


Ililllll 



WITH THE PROFESSOR 



iRANT SHOWERMAN 






■,^' 






->;, 


\ %- C^^ 


-r^. 







x^'-/.. 



x-^- .'W- 






n: 



"^^ v^' 



s^^ '<^. 






'^^t 









,0^^ 



-c- <^ 



^^^' ^' 



.0' ,*^ '« -t -^^ 



•-^^ 






^^0. '^C^ ' 



-:. ^- ^:^^ 









?-/^S 









.C \^^ 



<-' 0-'C^ 



•O- s 



^«-^"^' osc. >/. 



^^: v^^ 






c ^. 



-^y. <^ 






'^^ 



.x^^- ^'. 



'\' 






- ^ 



.^^' 



* /\ 



?^ ■% '-M^S 






.0" 



^ 


v>^ 


= ■•" '; 









^^. 




.^^■^ 





^^ v^^ 



,>■ -p^ 



^''. 






,0 o. 



.^> -^^^ 



• -^' 



C- ^ 



^- * 



V- \^ 



-S 









%:":r. 









0' s 









^>■ 



•^. c^ 






^-^.^^ 



'"r--\ A^ o../%. 






^N' ^ ' ■ <• , ' o- 






■^o 0^- 



#ii_ . ' 



.\N 



.0- 



.'^^^'^o^'' a^^^ "^c^ '" 
























^o,. .:.^^l,J^J 4 ^ 



<c- 



.c,' 






>>-^.,. 






-^ 






^ .^:^. % % cp' .^: 






.#' .■ 



.0 o 



• .0^ 






•' » A 



■f-r. .-V 



-0- X 






■^^ .^\^' 



n 



I\ 



WITH THE PROFESSOR 



BY 



GRANT SHOWERMAN 

PROFESSOR OF LATIN LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY 
OF WISCONSIN 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1910 






Copyright, igio 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Published^ February^ iqio 



©Gi A259022 



h 



QuiNTo Horatio Flacco 

QUOD SPIRO ET PLACEO, SI PLACEO, TUUMST 



PREFACE 

The author tenders thanks to Harper's Maga- 
zine for permission to reprint Chapter I, to the 
Atlantic Monthly for Chapters II and XII, to 
Scribner's Magazine for Chapter IV, and to the 
Educational Review for Chapters III, V, VI, 
VIII, and IX. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. A Prelude on Pessimism i 

II. The Strange Case of Dr. Scholarship and 

Mr. Homo 40 

III. Mud and Nails 75 

IV. The Professor Asks for More . . . .108 
V. A Desperate Situation 125 

VI. The Professor Recants 172 

VII. The Professor Travels in the Realms of 

Gold 207, 

VIII. The Professor Laughs at Education . . 239 

IX. A Goodly Apple Rotten at the Heart . . 260 

X. The Professor Misses the Sermon . . . 287 

XI. The Professor Spends an Evening Out . 307 

XII. Midnight on the Roof-Garden .... 335 



INTRODUCTION 

What M. Anatole France says of the literary 
critic : " The critic, if he would be frank, ought 
to say : ' Gentlemen, I am going to talk about 
myself apropos of Shakespeare, or Pascal, or 
Goethe,' " contains a formula which might also 
be applied to the Professor's sponsor. He, too, 
if he would be frank, ought to say : " Gentlemen, 
I am going to talk about myself apropos of the 
Professor." 

And yet, he desires nothing less than that his 
words should be regarded as autobiographical. 
It will transpire that the Professor herein de- 
lineated is bald, and has half a dozen children; 
whereas he himself has but two children, and dis- 
plays not the least symptom of baldness. Could 
anything make clearer the fact that the Professor 
and himself are not identical? 



X Introduction 

He begs, therefore, that the chapters which 
follow will not be looked upon as autobiography, 
but as fiction — with just the amount of truth 
necessary in an age of realism to make it con- 
vincing. 

With this, he draws the curtain on his friend 
the Professor 



WITH THE PROFESSOR 

CHAPTER I 
A PRELUDE ON PESSIMISM 

It was Saturday morning. The Professor's 
library was flooded with genial sunlight, and the 
Professor himself seemed somewhat under the 
same warm influence. He was lying back in his 
chair, his eyes resting on a little pile of books 
and a few sheets of manuscript lying on the 
table before him, and his features were relaxed 
in a smile of satisfaction. 

Now of course you who know that the Profes- 
sor was a teacher of ancient literature are 
already thinking that the books and manuscript 
and the satisfied expression betokened that he 
was just in at the finish of a successful chase of 
polysyndetic paronomasia, or anaphoric ataxia, 
or acatalectic dietetics, or something of the sort. 



2 With the Professor 

But you are mistaken. The books were not 
on literary topics. Quite the contrary, one of 
them bore the title Beitrdge zur Geschichte des 
Pessimismus, and others were suggestive of the 
same subject. The manuscript contained notes 
and excerpts, and the Professor's smiles were due 
to the character of his findings. 

The Professor was studying Pessimism. He 
had chosen a sunshiny Saturday morning as a 
purely hygienic measure : morning because it was 
a cheerful time of day; Saturday morning be- 
cause he fancied that his thoughts were saner 
on a day free from the mental habits of class- 
room instruction; and a sunshiny Saturday morn- 
ing because he wanted all the cheer it was pos- 
sible to get. 

To put it in the usual figure, the Professor was 
enough of a microbophobe to be in some dread 
of bacillus pessimisticus, and, with all his de- 
votion to science, was unwilling to expose him- 
self without precautions. 

And he was studying not only Pessimism; he 



A Prelude on Pessimism 3 

was studying the Professor also. To tell the 
truth, he had been called pessimist so many 
times of late that he had sometimes almost 
fallen prey to fear that he really zvas a pessi- 
mist. 

For example, he had not long before been 
called by the undesirable name as many as four 
times in a single day. In the first place, he had 
left his umbrella in the rack at the Carnegie 
Library; and when, on his arrival home and sud- 
den recollection of the fact before his own 
umbrella rack, his wife had said : " Never mind, 
your name is on it, and you will find it when you 
go back," he had replied: " Don't fool yourself; 
that's the last you'll ever see of that umbrella." 
At which his eldest daughter had looked up from 
her paradigms, and exclaimed : *' Now, papa, 
don't be such a pessimist! We had that word 
yesterday. It comes from mains, peior, pessi- 
mus, and teacher says it isn't nice." 

In the afternoon, meeting a friend while on 
the way to the College, he had ventured to pre- 



4 With the Professor 

diet, after deliberate scrutiny of the skies and 
wind, that it would rain for the next three days. 
He meant it, though of course his real motive 
was the desire to make conversation, which is a 
difficult art for college professors, because, un- 
like most of the other arts, it has not yet been 
reduced to the scientific method; but his friend 
had immediately pitched upon him with : " Man, 
what a pessimist you are! Don't you know 
we have a game to-morrow ? " 

Farther on, he had overtaken another col- 
league. Prompted by the same abhorrence of 
the conversational vacuum, and vaguely recol- 
lecting the coming game, he had volunteered: 
*' They say we have a fine team this year. 
Do you suppose we are going to get a game at 
last?" 

An avalanche of protestation overwhelmed 
him in a moment. " See here, now ! None of 
your pessimistic croaking! That's no way to 
talk! Of course we're going to get the game! 
We've got to get it!" 



A Prelude on Pessimism 5 

The Professor's thoughts were quicker than 
usual for a moment. He saw a way to redeem 
himself from the awful disgrace. " Don't be so 
swift," he said. *' I've got four dollars that I'm 
going to put up on our team to-morrow, and 
that ought to show whether I am a pessimist or 
not." " I'll take you for about three dollars 
of that myself," his optimistic friend had re- 
plied — rather eagerly, the Professor afterwards 
thought. 

A fourth time before the day was done he had 
been called the Evil Thing again. The table 
conversation turning, in un-Horatian fashion, on 
the homes and villas of others, the Professor 
had somewhat gravely said : " It's possible for 
my friends the banker and corporation attorney, 
I know; but I don't see how a professor, like my- 
self, with my family and on my salary, has any 
reason to expect to live in and own a ten thousand 
dollar home — at least in this life." 

This time it was his wife who spoke: " Dearie, 
what a pessimist you are! You are positively 



6 With the Professor 

growing worse every day"; and added, in the 
same breath : " I saw a perfect love of a hoHday 
hat at Chapeautier's to-day, and only nineteen- 
forty-nine! Don't you really think I could af- 
ford it?" 

Now the Professor's umbrella was the forty- 
seventh he had lost in the sixteen years of 
his service; he was so weatherwise from long 
experience that he knew well enough which was 
the wind that brought the rain ; his college had been 
defeated in every football game it had played 
with Atholimpia for nine years; and he had 
never been able to save from a year's salary more 
than a hundred and twenty-five dollars. He saw 
no really good reason why he should be called 
by a term of reproach because of his recognizing 
the value of lessons learned by experience. 

For the term was one of reproach, as every- 
one knows. Of course the Professor was aware 
that few who employed it really intended to be 
unpleasant, or even critical, or indeed had more 
than a hazy idea of what it signified. Quite the 



A Prelude on Pessimism 7 

contrary, he knew it was used by most people as 
a bit of wit, if not of humor, and was often only 
their barren way of commenting on what they 
failed to understand. Just as your ordinary 
reader of novels spoke of them as " odd," or 
" characteristic," or " funny," or ** interesting," 
or " just too dear " — so the ordinary person who 
enjoyed words and wasn't concerned as to their 
exact meaning was apt on the slightest excuse to 
assail you with a charge of being *' sarcastic," 
or " pessimistic." No one escaped these feeble 
shafts of wit, and the Professor knew that his 
cheerful neighbors were called pessimists almost 
as frequently as himself. 

But his attention had been attracted; he liked 
nice definition; he was guiltily conscious, too, of 
one or two oblique fibers in his own tempera- 
ment; and every repetition, however innocent, of 
the time-honored witticism seemed more and more 
like an impeachment. He was really beginning 
to be annoyed. 

For, whatever it was that people meant when 



8 With the Professor 

they called him pessimist, the Professor would 

not own to the charge. It is true. 

He was not gamesome : he did lack some part 
Of that quick spirit which was in Antony; 

but he was nevertheless no lean and hungry Cas- 
sius who seldom smiled. Most of the time he 
had a merry heart, and it kept on the windy side 
of care. He saw the humor of the world. He 
did not believe it had been created as a place of 
torment for sinful man, in spite of still vivid 
impressions from the preaching of his childhood 
days. He enjoyed his home and his profession, 
possessed a fair measure of philosophic calm, and 
lived and worked with the zest of the active and 
aspiring mind. 

No, the Professor was not a pessimist; he felt 
sure of it. And he felt sure that if people called 
him that, either in jest or earnest, it was because 
they did not know what pessimism was. So it 
had occurred to him that if he could give a few 
of his immediate acquaintances a handy definition 
of the term, they might not be quite so facile in 



A Prelude on Pessimism 9 

the application of it to himself and to others like 
him. Good; such a handy definition he would 
construct. 

But a comprehensive definition had not been 
so easy. The shortest he could formulate had 
filled half a page, and the first time he had 
tried to silence a friend with it he became in- 
volved in a four hours' discussion in the effort 
to make his meaning clear. 

This would never do. He liked talk, but at 
this rate he might as well have been a professor 
of comparative philosophy, or politics, or peda- 
gogy. He must have a better definition. 

In the library next day, his eye had by the 
merest chance lighted on a neat little book in 
green binding with Le Pessimisme in gold on its 
back. Without the least disturbance to his 
esthetic sensibilities because of the inap- 
propriateness of the binding to the subject, he 
joyfully seized on the volume and bore it o& 
home, together with a small armful of companion 
works of less modest bulk and more pretentious 



lo With the Professor 

titles. As little did he stop to reflect that a col- 
lege professor with such childlike faith in books 
had no need of trying to establish a claim to 
optimism. Here was a find, indeed ! He was as 
good as rehabilitated in the eyes of his friends. 

This explains how it came about that the 
Professor sat in his study before a pile of books 
on Pessimism, and it also accounts for his smile 
of satisfaction. It is true, he had not found a 
quotable definition; but he had reveled in vast 
fields of learning, and accumulated much interest- 
ing and valuable information. He had found 
chapters on the origin of the term pessimism; on 
its use among the various philosophers of the 
nineteenth century; on the life of the learned 
German with the long name who had given it 
currency by the formulation of the pessimistic 
philosophy; on its possible and not improbable 
connection with various phases of social, eco- 
nomic, pedagogic, literary, alimentary, and 
pathological change. 

His principal interest, however, as befitted a 



A Prelude on Pessimism ii 

professor of literature, lay in the statistical data 
which these works presented. There were 
various tables of figures compiled by a doctor of 
philosophy who held the chair of English litera- 
ture in a neighboring institution: the word 
pessimism was found 725 times in Macaulay, 
whereas in Carlyle there were only 723 occur- 
rences, which clearly overturned hitherto prevail- 
ing views of scholarship as to the respective 
temperaments of these great men. In Tennyson 
and Austin the word occurred an equal number of 
times, which made it probable that the one was 
influenced by the other, if not in collusion with 
him ; or, at any rate, that both were influenced by 
a common but unknown original of the second 
decade of the century. 

Again, in the dissertation of a sociologist who 
had been called to the Professor's own institu- 
tion because of the brilliant results of this very 
investigation, he found that of 627 patients in 
19 hospitals in 23 cities in 14 states and 2 terri- 
tories, 75.13 per cent, had declared themselves 



12 With the Professor 

optimists. In lunatic asylums the percentage rose 
to 97.293, while in jails and poorhouses and 
prisons it sank respectively to 17. i, 3.0658, and 
12.6. Of 500 cases of the clergy, 98 per cent, 
of the 400 who had salaries of less than $600 
and families of more than 5 children had de- 
clared themselves optimists; while of 100 who re- 
ceived salaries of over $1,500 and had families 
of less than 3 members, children included, one 
had unreservedly confessed pessimism — but had 
afterward volunteered the further statement that 
if the remaining 99 had the courage, they would 
all make like confession, even though optimism 
was the fashion; because not even religion could 
endure the strain of being asked to live on a 
social level with $25,000 parishioners when you 
had only a $1,600 salary. The author of the 
dissertation, however, argued with mathematical 
accuracy that there was a clear connection be- 
tween big salaries and optimism. 

Another work — this was a book by a national 
authority on pedagogy — ^presented certain results 



A Prelude on Pessimism 13 

of epistolary and oral inquiry among pupils in 
high schools, grades, and kindergarten. His 
most important deductions were: (i) 100 per 
cent, of children in the kindergarten and 99.5 
per cent, of those in the grades did not know 
what optimism and pessimism meant; (2) among 
high school students 32 per cent, of those in 
the Latin course and 2 per cent, of those in 
other courses had heard of the terms; (3) an 
examination of the temperamental characteristics 
of large numbers of children indicated that pes- 
simism and optimism might exist even when the 
individual had never heard of the terms. Such 
cases, however, were not frequent. Of 900 chil- 
dren under 10 years of age, only five were 
pessimists, the fact in two of the cases being 
traceable to fathers who were drunk 84 per cent. 
of their waking time, and in the remaining three 
cases, which at first were baffling, to mothers 
who were on the managing committees of the 
Child Study Class and the Cribside Charities. 
Of conscious pessimists, the high school con- 



14 With the Professor 

tained the greatest number, the causes most 
frequently assigned being the obligation to study 
what they didn't Hke and couldn't see the use 
of, and the disposition of the faculty to interfere 
with their social and athletic liberties. 

But, valuable as all this was, it did not in the 
least forward the Professor's project: he was 
compelled to resign himself to the conviction that 
it was impossible to find the desired definition 
in books. His only resort was to his own powers, 
after all. 

So he would make a last attempt; only, re- 
membering his former failures, this time he would 
invoke the aid of popular definition. Perhaps by 
skilful combination of expressions in vogue 
among ordinary people he might produce a for- 
mula which would serve to quote to the ordinary 
person. It was unscholarly and degrading, 
but he was desperate, and forgot for the 
moment his natural professorial horror of the 
popular. 

So he began to assemble the witty and pithy 



A Prelude on Pessimism 15 

utterances he had heard and read on optimism 
and pessimism. The pessimist looked only on 
the dark side of life, the optimist only on the 
bright. The optimist always saw the doughnut, 
the pessimist always saw the hole. The opti- 
mist went through life thinking that all milk 
was cream, the pessimist that all cream was 
milk. 

As to this last, the Professor had behind him 
a boarding-house experience totaling at least a 
half score of years, and recognized the inevita- 
bility of pessimism for boarders on the basis 
of this definition; though he conceded the de- 
sirability of optimism, provided it was leagued 
with real power of mind over matter, especially 
lacteal matter. 

He continued. The pessimist looked through 
the wrong end of the telescope. The pessimist 
saw the rule, the optimist the exception. The 
optimist used a magnifying glass in contempla- 
tion of his joys, the pessimist in contemplation of 
his troubles. The optimist didn't choose between 



i6 With the Professor 

two evils, because he would not concede their ex- 
istence; the pessimist also didn't choose, but be- 
cause he expected to get both of them any- 
way. The optimist considered and treated every 
man as honest until he had proven him.- 
self a villain; the pessimist considered him a 
rascal until he had proved himself honest. The 
optimists were the robins of life, the pessimists 
were the ravens ; mankind was divided into those 
whose usual note was " cheer-up," and those who 
croaked. 

To be sure, the Professor thought this a trifle 
unfair to the many- wintered prophet of the rain : 
who possessed at least the virtue of silence ex- 
cept when he foresaw trouble in the sky. And 
besides, warning of bad weather to come was 
no mean form of service to mankind, who ought 
to be grateful for it. 

Recognizing the originality of this observation, 
the Professor was emboldened to enter the field 
of epigram himself: the pessimist acted on the 
assumption that everything was as bad as he 



A Prelude on Pessimism 17 

was afraid it might be; the optimist, on the as- 
sumption that everything was as good as it would 
be pleasant to have it be. 

Or again — the Professor never could get away 
from books — the optimist was a Micawber, al- 
ways expecting something good to turn up; the 
pessimist a Mrs. Gummidge, a lone lorn creetur', 
with whom everythink went contrairy. Or the 
pessimist was a Leopardi, looking upon life as all 
bitterness and vexation, death the only gift of 
fate to the human race, and seeing in all existence 
only infinite emptiness — 

L' infinita vanita del tutto ; 

while the optimist was a — but the Professor 
could think of no one in literature who was as 
hopeful as the Italian poet was hopeless. Some- 
how, optimism seemed a less striking, and, on 
the whole, a less attractive quality in literature 
than pessimism. The poets who had most won 
the hearts of men seemed to be those who felt 
the sadness of human life, and gave utterance 



1 8 With the Professor 

to their sympathy, rather than those whose theme 
was the joy of existence. 

Or — books again — the pessimist was a Lucre- 
tius, ill auguring for the babe cast on the shores 
of Hght : 

The infant, hapless mariner cast up 

By angry waves upon the coasts of life, 

Lies naked on the ground, sans power of speech. 

Sans every aid of life, soon as the throes 

Of natural anguish from his mother's womb 

Have thrust him forth upon the shores of light; 

And fills the air with mournful wail, as fits 

One doomed to meet so many woes in life — 

while the optimist saw deHght in destiny, and 
in the babe's cry heard, not waiHng, but jubilation. 

The Professor's friend in experimental psy- 
chology told him that the investigative apparatus 
thus far available was insufficient to determine 
the real psychic state of newborn infants, but as- 
sured him that the fact of the noise itself had 
been established beyond all doubt by synchronous 
experiment in three countries. 

This was no news to the Professor, who 



A Prelude on Pessimism 19 

was possessed, despite his calling, of a really 
Catonic knowledge of his children. And here, 
by the way, he bethought himself of another il- 
lustration — not bookish, this time. X)ne of his 
youngest two children, when you held'^^p be- 
fore him a terra cotta lamp, or a fragment of 
giallo antic from the veneering of the Rostra, 
or a bit of opus reticitlatum from the Villa of 
Hadrian, or the latest Latin Grammar, or any 
other of the playthings in ordinary use in the 
homes of classical professors, began without the 
least hesitation to pucker up and cry, taking for 
granted that the toy was to be denied him. The 
other, when the same act was repeated, straight- 
way stretched out his hands and chuckled, already 
assured of possession, and filled with the joy of 
anticipation. Here surely, were natural optimism 
and pessimism. 

At this point the Professor paused, and medi- 
tated. If his children went through life with 
that attitude, both were sure to have a great deal 
of trouble of their own making; for they were 



20 With the Professor 

both inclined to draw wrong conclusions. They 
exaggerated. And what was true of them was 
likewise true of the optimists and pessimists in 
all the illustrations he had been reviewing. Here 
was at least one essential : it wasn't so much that 
the pessimist was gloomy and the optimist cheer- 
ful, as that their cheer and gloom were always 
exaggerated. He was getting on with his defi- 
nition; one foundation of pessimism was exag- 
geration. 

Furthermore, as this exaggeration was not of 
the conscious kind, pessimism was really due 
to lack of balance. The Professor understood 
now why he had felt so much resentment at 
being called a pessimist. It was really an im- 
peachment of his understanding, and of his power 
of self-control. Here he had for years culti- 
vated the Horatian and Sophoclean ideal of sane 
self-restraint and philosophic calm, had taken 
pride in regulating his conduct according to the 
aurea mediocritas, the ne quid nimis, and the 
fxrfdev ccyav of the ancients — golden sayings af- 



A Prelude on Pessimism 21 

fixed, so to speak, to the walls of his intellectual 
Delphic sanctuary — only to be called ill-balanced, 
unjudicial, and deficient in will. It touched his 
amour propre, you see; and everyone knows that 
professors are very much conceited, engaged 
continually as they are in imposing their own 
ideas upon defenseless students who dare not talk 
back, for fear of certain consequences known to 
the academic world. 

The Professor's little burst of resentment was 
so vivid that he was tempted to retort upon his 
critics that, after all, the pessimist was no worse 
than the cheerful idiot who insisted on calling a 
spade a tennis racquet; but he recalled the fate of 
the long line of satirists, including even the good- 
humored ones like Horace and Thackeray, who 
had been charged with cynicism because they 
pointed out with frankness the faults of silly 
people. It was bad enough to be called a pes- 
simist; but to be called a cynic, i.e., a pessimist 
who snarls and barks at every fault he sees, 
would be still worse. After all, there was d, 



22 With the Professor 

great deal of difference between being called a 
pessimist and a dog of a pessimist. He might 
be a weeping philosopher, but no Diogenes. 

And yet, it was clear that ordinary optimism 
was just as extreme as pessimism. Whatever 
their manifestations, the foundation was always 
the same for both : lack of equilibrium. Neither 
optimist nor pessimist was well poised. 

To set down lack of equilibrium as the founda- 
tion of pessimism and optimism, however, was to 
beg the question. What lay at the root of this 
lack? 

The Professor cast about. He thought of 
several things, but the first and chiefest that 
occurred to him was lack of judgment. Neither 
optimist nor pessimist saw phenomena in their 
true relations. 

But what in turn was the cause of deficiency 
in judgment? When the pessimist made up 
his mind that life was all skim-milk, or the 
optimist that mining-stock was a safe invest- 
ment, and that promoters were actuated solely 



A Prelude on Pessimism 23 

by solicitude for the welfare of professors and 
other investors, what was the trouble with 
them? 

Clearly, lack of knowledge. Not necessarily 
book knowledge, of course. Rather, knowledge 
of life gained through various avenues: from 
books to some extent, but much more from ex- 
perience. The intellectuality of the broadest ex- 
perience was the prime foundation of that sanity 
and equipoise which everyone must possess who 
was to be neither the pessimist nor the optimist 
of popular imagination. The truth should make 
men free. 

Now the Professor had been young, and now 
was older. He had had some experience, and 
had actually learned by it, professorial paradox 
as that may seem. In his extreme youth he had 
been an optimist : 

When all the world was young, lad, 

And all the trees were green; 
And every goose a swan, lad, 

And every lass a queen; 



24 With the Professor 

and all the doughnuts were hole-proof, and all 
the milk was cream, and his eyes were dazzled 
by the brightness of a world filled with honest 
men and innocent enjoyment. 

But he had gone away from home to the 
academy, and while pursuing what in those days 
in that town was considered the main concern 
of secondary school education — attending trials 
in the circuit court near by — he had been hor- 
rified to find that men lied shamefully under oath, 
that to serve their own petty ends they took 
advantage of helplessness and poverty, that 
women threw away their honor, and that in a 
single session of court he might hear sounded 
the entire gamut of human folly, perfidy, and 
crime. 

And then he had gone away to college. On 
the morning after the first night of his first glee 
club trip, a member of the party, a young man 
void of understanding, had come in with his shirt 
front written over with the name of the strange 
woman. Others had come in at midnight, drunk 



A Prelude on Pessimism 25 

and cursing; and at the end of the trip the 
student manager had rendered no account. 

He had also gone abroad, and had seen the 
cruel life of sea-faring men, the circling of birds 
of prey over the track of the tourist, the bestial- 
ity of Hfe in large cities, the all-pervasive spirit 
of greed, manifest even in the enslavement of 
women and the exploitation of childhood. 

And then he had come home to his own 
country, where it was as if his eyes had been 
opened : for he saw there, too, much that he had 
first witnessed abroad, and had supposed foreign 
to his own land. It was about this time, too, 
that for some reason or other a great many per- 
sons were insisting that the optimists lay aside 
their magnifying glasses and look at the real 
thing for a moment; so that the Professor on 
landing found himself confronted with many 
surprises. 

Each one of these experiences had been a 
discouragement for the time being, but salutary in 
the end. The Professor's judgments became 



26 With the Professor 

saner, even if not true and righteous altogether. 
He learned to calculate somewhat more accurately 
the economic, or gastronomic, effect of the hole 
in the doughnut, and to recognize the inferiority 
of blue milk as a producer of red blood. He saw 
that a landscape had shadows as well as lights. 

In other words, he began to see life steadily, 
and see it whole, and perfection in that respect 
became his ideal. In the usual sense, he wished 
to be called neither optimist nor pessimist. More 
than that, if the penalty for not blinking the 
truth were to be called pessimistic by the crowd, 
he would with patience endure the martyrdom. 

It might be that others enjoyed themselves 
if they called a spade by some other name, but 
for his single self, he preferred to call it a spade, 
and to know what he was dealing with : it was really 
inconvenient to find yourself in the tennis court 
with a spade, and a racquet was useless in a 
garden. It might be ever so pleasant to assume 
that the Persian rugs and gold beads and Etrus- 
can antiquities you spent your earnings on were 



A Prelude on Pessimism 27 

genuine, but if they were not, if your Etruscan 
terra cottas had merely had a season or two in 
the dirt of a modern Roman cellar, you lost your 
money the first time an expert croaked the pes- 
simistic truth at you. The exercise of a reason- 
able amount of caution in deaHng with men not 
only made your salary go farther, but helped 
along in no mean degree the cause of good 
morals. 

The Professor had seen something of the re- 
sults of long continued popular optimism in civic 
life. For generations it had been the proper and 
patriotic thing to assume that every American 
citizen was incorruptible, and that everything in 
the market was fit to eat ; but now the contrary as- 
sumption was the fashion. Every man was taken 
for an actual or potential villain, and the land 
swarmed with deadly microbes and pure food 
inspectors. The optimists, having been induced 
to throw away their glasses, had been obliged 
to look through those of their friends the pessi- 
mists ; for they had gone so long without relying 



28 With the Professor 

upon their natural eyesight that they had to have 
glasses of some kind. 

It was clear, then, that the most efficient cor- 
rective of the follies of both optimism and pes- 
simism was knowledge. The pessimist knew too 
little of the real world in his way, the optimist 
too little in his way. The truth was needed to 
set them free. 

But there were other foundations besides 
knowledge for the equilibrium that insured 
against pessimism. For there were persons in 
apparent good health, with abundant knowledge 
of books and men and things, who were ill- 
balanced. When a professor with good digestion, 
who had studied and traveled, had married an 
heiress, and who sat in royal state high on the 
throne of departmental despotism and had to 
work only an hour or two now and then — when 
such a personage was pessimistic, what was one 
to think? 

The Professor didn't hesitate long. It was 
temperament that lay at the foundation of such 



A Prelude on Pessimism 29 

cases. Just what temperament was, he wasn't 
quite clear, but he thought it meant how you felt 
as a usual thing. And this depended upon how 
nature had fashioned you. The pessimist by 
temperament was ill constructed by nature, as 
by an unskilful workman. And of course nature 
had also framed temperamental optimists. 

But the Professor thought of optimists by 
temperament who suddenly became either tem- 
porary or permanent pessimists, and of the many 
who alternated between pessimism and optimism. 
There must be something else besides tempera- 
ment. 

That something else, he concluded, after a 
moment's reflection, must be the state of one's 
health. Temperament was your native and per- 
manent spiritual condition; the effect of health 
was temporary and accidental. You had a good 
digestion, and you were an optimist; your liver 
failed you, and you became pessimistic — all in 
the same day. Certainly there was nothing like 
physical ailment to overcast the skies. 



30 With the Professor 

The Professor himself was often depressed to 
the depths : 

Life was as tedious as a twice-told tale, 
Vexing the dull ears of a drowsy man — 

when there was no cause for it visible either to 
himself or anyone else, so far as external cir- 
cumstances were concerned. Reason told him 
that his affairs were going well, had gone well, 
and would go well. His friends also told himi 
so. In vain; on such days he suffered as much 
as if he really were in trouble. 

At times he was tempted to believe that this 
kind of pessimism — for which you surely will not 
blame anyone, however much you dislike it — de- 
pended altogether on health, and that no sort 
of education made the least difference with it. 

But knowledge was not useless, even here, 
though it made but little headway. The Pro- 
fessor's intellectual judgments, based upon 
experience of men and books, acted as a great 
balance wheel, or governor, and helped him 



A Prelude on Pessimism 31 

keep the machine going until new energy arrived, 
and the crisis was past. Whenever he realized, 
from signs long since become familiar, that an- 
other visit of the enemy was imminent, he threw 
up his earthworks of philosophy, and provisioned 
his garrison for another siege — or, in a more ap- 
propriate figure, when he saw the skies drooping 
again, he made ready his craft for another long 
drift through the fog. Ordinarily, he sailed out 
into blue sky before his provisions were ex- 
hausted; though of course he knew that some 
time the clouds would return after the rain. 

But aside from temperament, ailment, and 
ignorance, there was still another foundation of 
pessimism — environment, of which his sociologi- 
cal friends had so much to say. And surely, it 
was responsible for a great many of what the 
cheerful crowd called pessimists. A man might 
by fortune be so placed in the world as not to 
have the opportunity of seeing much that was 
bright. He might of necessity be poverty- 
stricken, or of diseased stock, or of an unsanitary 



32- With the Professor 

neighborhood, or he might have a mother-in-law. 
It might be impossible for him to escape, do what 
he would. He might take a dark view of life, 
and yet a perfectly truthful one. There were 
the wise words of Puck : Possibly the fact that 
the optimist sees the doughnut and the pessimist 
the hole is due to the further fact that the opti- 
mist has mostly doughnut and the pessimist 
mostly hole. Why should such men be tagged 
with a vile name, when they were thinking and 
acting on the basis of reality? Over men like 
that the mantle of charity ought to be extended — 
if indeed they did not prove, on closer examina- 
tion, to be more worthy of the title of real op- 
timist than of pessimist. 

For most of the witticisms on optimism and 
pessimism, and most attempts at definition, were 
reprehensible in one respect: they were founded 
rather on the way men felt and talked than on 
how they acted, and they took account, not of 
whole careers, but of attitudes for the moment. 
And judgments upon men were made in the 



A Prelude on Pessimism 33 

same facile way — most of them haphazard, and 
many of them outrageous. 

The Professor called to mind one of his former 
neighbors. This man had been in poor health 
for twenty years, and finally submitted to the 
surgeon's knife; but the relief was only partial. 
Other members of his household were taken ill, 
until he was surrounded by ailing people. 

His money went, and most of his practice. 
His nerves were wrecked by the strain of exces- 
sive and long continued care. He saw the likeli- 
hood of his own recovery grow less, and less, 
and vanish. His mind grew somber with care 
and disease, and sometimes he felt as if he was 
without friends. The way did look dark, and the 
way was dark. His friends — rather his ac- 
quaintances — ^told him to cheer up, to look on 
the bright side. He tried to, but he couldn't. 
There was no bright side there. And so they 
called him pessimistic. 

And yet the Professor's friend went on in this 
way for several years. He smiled all he could, 



34 With the Professor 

never complained, replied to no charges, and dis- 
cussed his affairs with no one. He worked on, 
saw his family back to health again, comforted 
the last years of his mother, paid his debts, set 
his house in order — and died. At the cemetery, 
one of a knot of men standing by in the usual 
embarrassed silence, remarked, in order to make 
talk, that he had put up a good fight. 

On the other hand, the Professor had known 
of the cases of many optimists — among them 
several who had been notable for their attacks 
upon their brethren of the more sober type — 
who had failed miserably in their time of stress. 
The toothache, an attack of indigestion, a fall in 
stocks, the loss of a pet animal, the failure of 
a lecture, the prevalence of an east wind or a 
fog — had converted them in the twinkling of an 
eye from optimism to pessimism of the most 
malignant type. Some of them had committed 
suicide, unable to weather the storm until sun- 
shine came again. Others, to escape the ills with 
which they were threatened, had soiled their 



i 



A Prelude on Pessimism 35 

honor in the most craven manner. Their boasted 
optimism had been false, or built on insecure 
foundations. It was the sum-total of a man's 
philosophy, and above all, the sum-total of his 
conduct, which determined whether he was a 
pessimist or an optimist. 

As a matter of fact, many who were regarded 
by their laughing neighbors as pessimists were 
in reality only idealists. There was no more 
common mistake among the multitude. It was 
natural enough for an idealist sometimes to fall 
prey to discouragement, and to let it appear : the 
disparity between what was and what ought to 
be was so great. Like Mrs. Gummidge, he felt 
more than other people did, and showed it more. 

But the discouragement and discontent of the 
idealist were not of the base and unhealthy sort. 
They were rather of the noble cast of Lowell's 
discontent, the longing for better things: 

Of all the myriad moods of mind 
That through the soul come thronging, 

What one was e'er so dear, so kind. 
So beautiful, as longing? 



36 With the Professor 

The thing we long for, that we are 

For one transcendent moment, 
Before the present, poor and bare,, 

Can make its sneering comment. 

Such dissatisfaction with reality was not incon- 
sistent with optimism, though it might be mis- 
taken for pessimism. A proper amount of it 
was essential to the healthy spirit. And this 
was why some of the Professor's friends com- 
mended what he had written as being charac- 
terized by a healthy tone of optimism, while 
others had expressed regret at the detection of a 
note of pessimism in the selfsame material. The 
truth or falsity of such criticism depended on 
what you held as your ideal. Those who looked 
from the foothills to the plain thought themselves 
high above the rest of mankind, and laughed; to 
those whose gaze was lifted to the mountain peak, 
the hills seemed insignificant, the way arduous. 
Their faces were serious, but full of calm and 
light. 

So that when, at the end of his meditation, the 
Professor came to sum up his conclusions, they 



A Prelude on Pessimism 37 

were these : an optimist was one who, by reason 
of Hmited experience, fortunate temperament, 
good health, favorable environment — any or all — 
had come to entertain an unduly cheerful view of 
life; a pessimist was one who, by reason of limited 
experience, unfortunate temperament, ill health, 
unfavorable environment — any or all — had come 
to entertain an unduly cheerless view of life. If 
a man must be the one or the other, perhaps it 
was better to be a cheerfully foolish optimist than 
a foolishly gloomy pessimist; but if he wished to 
be satisfied with life, and fortified against mis- 
fortune, and to be a reliable member of society, 
let him cultivate equilibrium. Let him get health 
and experience, and, above all, let him learn from 
what he saw and what he read. Wisdom was 
the principal thing: therefore let him get wisdom. 
The wise man was less than only Jove. Life 
needed no defenders to the person who was sane : 
it spoke for itself; it was full of a number of 
things. 
Feeling something of relief, the Professor laid 



38 With the Professor 

down his pencil and leaned back in his chair, and 
let vacant eyes rest for some time on the ceiling. 
He had reclined thus for a few minutes, when 
there swam gradually into the field of his con- 
sciousness a vaguely bright spot. 

Being of an observant turn of mind, he began 
to wonder where the spot came from. It was not 
caused by a mirror, for there was none in the 
room. Could it be the small boy in the house 
opposite ? He went to the window to investigate. 
When he moved, the spot vanished. He assumed 
his original position, and the spot was there. He 
rubbed his head in wonder; the spot came and 
went as he rubbed. Slowly but surely he realized 
that it was the reflection from his prematurely 
bald head. 

Just then there was a knock, and his wife 
entered. The Professor called her attention to 
the phenomenon, and added, with a sigh : " How 
old I am getting!'' "Nonsense!" she replied. 
" Don't be so pessimistic ! " 

The Professor put out his hand for the notes. 



A Prelude on Pessimism 39 

with an incipient frown, but thought better of his 
intention, and leaned back again. He would 
wait until he had read, thought, and written a 
little more, and then he would overwhelm her. 

But he did say : " My dear, you may order that 
hat. I have here the notes for a long article 
which I am going to send to a magazine, and they 
can never refuse it. We'll have the hat, and next 
summer that vacation trip we have talked of so 
long.'' 

This was optimistic enough for the most in- 
sistent abuser of pessimists. 



CHAPTER II 

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. SCHOLAR- 
SHIP AND MR. HOMO 

It was one night some ten years before the 
episode of the prematurely bald head. The Pro- 
fessor's study was a single cube of brightness in 
the midst of the almost universal darkness of 
the little college town; and the Professor him- 
self, solitary and silent, was sitting at his study 
table— books to the right of him, books to the 
left of him, books in front of him — hard at work 
on Terminations in T, while all the world 
slumbered. 

The Professor's dissertation on Sundry Suf- 
fixes in S, written for the degree of doctor of 
philosophy and published five years before, had 
won such golden opinions that he had launched 

into further investigation with eye single to the 

40 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 41 

glory of scholarship, scorning delights, and living 
days so laborious that at thirty he already dis- 
played signs of the silvery livery of advised age. 
Terminations in T was to be chapter xii in his 
book on Consonantal Terminations in the Com- 
edies of Terence, which was to be followed by 
another volume on Prefixes in P in the Plays of 
Plautus. Hence his apparition among the many 
books with no end. 

But something was amiss with the Professor. 
It was not the lateness of the hour, though it was 
long after midnight. Something more permanent 
than mere weariness was manifest in his counte- 
nance. His features wore a wondering, worry- 
ing, harried expression. You could see that he 
was unsettled. 

The fact is that the Professor had for some 
time been wavering in his faith. Not his religious 
faith — I don't mean that, for Consonantal Ter- 
minations had so far crowded that out that it 
claimed small share in the Professor's cogitations 
— but his faith in the importance of terminations 



42 With the Professor 

in general, and particularly of Consonantal Ter- 
minations in the Comedies of Terence. He had 
been losing — indeed, had lost — the reposeful 
sense of equilibrium and stability which had been 
to him the peace that passeth understanding so 
long as he had entertained absolutely no question 
as to the claim of Terminations to be his mission 
in life. And now a crisis was at hand. 

For you must know that the Professor was, or 
had been when he came home from Europe to 
occupy his chair, a strictly approved product of 
the Great Graduate System of Scholarship. The 
appreciation of that fact, and of the process of 
its achievement, will help you to understand his 
present frame of mind. 

He had been an eager student of the classics 
even in the secondary school, and his enthusiasm 
had grown during the college course. He 
thought he knew why men had for nineteen cen- 
turies loved Virgil's lay and Livy's pictured page, 
he was deeply stirred by the sentiment of Rome's 
least mortal mind on Old Age and Friendship, 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 43 

and felt all the glowing delight of genial associa- 
tion with the wise and kindly heathen of the 
Sabine Farm. " The wisdom of the ancients " 
was to him no idle phrase; their words seemed 
to him golden. Of form, he had less apprecia- 
tion; but there were rare moments when he 
thought that he too could hear the surge and 
thunder of the Odyssey, and feel the reposeful 
progress of the stateliest measure ever molded 
by the lips of man. 

And so, under the double impulse of his en- 
thusiasm for literature and his admiration for 
the genial and pure-hearted old professor who 
was also his friend and inspirer, he determined 
to spend his life in teaching the subject he loved. 
He had drunk of the waters freely, and longed to 
direct others to the fountain. To have young 
men and women sit at his feet and partake of 
the wisdom that giveth life to them that have it, 
to know that they felt toward their interpreter 
of the ancient masterpieces as he himself felt 
toward the venerable friend who illumined the 



44 With the Professor 

page of antiquity for him, seemed to him the 
prize of a high calling abundantly worth pressing 
toward. 

This was at the end of his junior year. By the 
end of the senior year he had decided to prepare 
for a college career, and arranged to spend three 
years in graduate study. He must be a scholar 
sans penr et sans reproche, and to insure against 
the possible failure of the world to recognize his 
genuineness, he must be approved by the System, 
and be stamped Ph.D.; and because the value of 
the stamp depended very much upon the im- 
primeur, he must go to a university which en- 
joyed an unassailable reputation for Scholarship. 

He had always felt helpless before the immens- 
ity of knowledge, and nobly discontented with his 
own achievement, and had been sustained only 
by the conviction that he really saw the light, 
and saw it increasingly; but now that he was in 
the presence of Real Scholarship, he was aghast 
at the depth of his ignorance. Gross darkness 
covered him, and he groped in it. He despaired. 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 45 

What he knew about Latin seemed to count for 
nothing here; he was made to feel that the 
accuracy and thoroughness which he had been 
taught so well were pitifully inadequate. He 
knew his forms and syntax perfectly, and his 
translation was rich in idiom and spirit as a 
result, and he had supposed that it was to insure 
this end that his old preceptor had been so in- 
sistent upon the m(astery of linguistic mechanism; 
but now, because he knew nothing of the theories 
of the subjunctive, and had never heard of 
rhotacism and vowel-weakening, he was of all 
men most miserable. He could read hexameter 
with ease, declaim Cicero with real effect, and 
was saturated with Socratic discourse, but no one 
seemed to value those accomplishments here ; they 
went for naught because he was ignorant on 
the subject of rhythmical clausulae, and unac- 
quainted with the last seven articles in the Journal 
of Metrology on the comparative merits of the 
quantitative and accentual theories. His appre- 
ciation of the difference between the streaming 



46 With the Professor 

eloquence of Ciceronianism and the jolting grav- 
ity of Tacitus, the smiling satire of Horace and 
the wrathful lashings of Juvenal — of what avail, 
when he was unable to enumerate in order the 
annalists, or define the relationship between 
Lucilius and the Old Comedy? Of what conse- 
quence, too, that he was intimately acquainted 
with Pliny and Martial, and their manner of 
life and thought, when he knew only one theory 
of the cut of the Roman toga, and was unable 
to state whether sandals were removed in the 
vestibule or the atrium? What virtue in his 
English versions of Catullus? Clearly the im- 
portant thing there was to know the derivation 
of the manuscripts in class P'. 

His disappointment was great. It seemed as 
if everything he had learned was of minor im- 
portance. What he had been taught to magnify 
he now had to minimize; instead of being carried 
along in the current of his enthusiasm, he found 
himself compelled to row against it. 

At first, he bordered on rebellion. He had 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 47 

expected to continue the study of the Latin clas- 
sics — to read, interpret, criticize, and enjoy; but 
what he was actually occupied with was a variety 
of things no one of which was essential to literary 
enjoyment or appreciation, and whose sum-total 
might almost as well have been called mathe- 
matics, or statistics, as classical literature. When 
he thought of his college instruction, he won- 
dered whether the end and the means had not 
in some way got interchanged. He felt that 
now he was dealing with the husk instead of the 
kernel, with the penumbra rather than the nucleus, 
with the roots and branches, and not the flower. 
In his gloomier moments, he suspected that his 
preceptors and companions were actually ignorant 
that there was a flower; if they were aware of 
it, they were at least strangely indifferent to its 
color and perfume. In his more cheerful mo- 
ments, it made him laugh to see the gravity with 
which, omnia magna loquentes, they considered 
the momentous questions as to whether a poet 
wrote Jupiter with two p's or one, Virgil with an 



48 With the Professor 

i or an e, and how many knots were in the big 
stick of Hercules. It all seemed to him monstrous 
and distorted. He found himself thinking of 
five-legged calves, two-headed babies, and other 
side-show curiosities. 

But he had always been docile, and did not fail 
to reflect that scholars of reputation surely knew 
better than he what stuff scholarship was made 
of. He put aside his own inclinations, and duti- 
fully submitted to the System; its products were 
to be found in prominent positions throughout the 
land, and what better proof of its righteousness 
than that ? Under the direction of one professor, 
he filled a note-book with fragmentary data about 
Fescennine Verses, Varro Atacinus, and Furius 
Bibaculus; another book was devoted to membra 
of dramatists scattered from Susarion and Thes- 
pis to Decimus Laberius and Pseudo-Seneca; still 
another to the location, exact measurements (met- 
ric system), and history (dates), of every ruin 
of ancient Rome; others to statistics on the use 
of copulative coordinates, the historical present, 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 49 

and diphthongal i. In the seminar he presented 
compilations of text criticism, and numerical com- 
parisons of subjunctives and ablatives with im- 
peratives and genitives, and spent weeks in pre- 
paring for a two-hours' lead on six lines of text, 
treating them syntactically, epigraphically, paleo- 
graphically, archeologically, philologically — and 
finally, if time permitted, esthetically. He could 
not, indeed, escape the reflection that, in half the 
time which he was obliged to consume in these 
activities, he might have gone far on the road 
to those powers of literary appreciation and that 
richness of intellectual equipment which he had 
always coveted; the study of things about litera- 
ture left him no time to study literature itself. 
He was athirst and famished: literature, litera- 
ture everywhere, and not a moment for it. But he 
was in pursuit of Scholarship, and though It 
should slay him, yet would he trust in It. He 
settled to his work. 

He was not long in learning the lesson. He 
was to be accurate, he was to be thorough, and 



50 With the Professor 

he was to employ method. That is, he was to be 
scientific — which, he soon found out, meant to 
treat his material as the mathematicians and chem- 
ists treated theirs. The seminar, he was told, was 
the laboratory of the classical student; and he 
gathered from the tone and manner in which the 
information was conveyed that this was meant to 
dispose of a possible argument against the study 
of the classics. Why literature, which was an 
art, a thing of the spirit, should be treated as if 
it were composed of chemicals, or fossils, or 
mathematical symbols, or a quarry, he was not 
told, and did not audibly inquire, at least after 
the first month. He went on his way, trying hard 
to convince himself that it mattered as greatly 
as his associates seemed to think whether the 
battle of the Allia was fought in 390 or 388; 
whether the ratio of perfect subjunctives of pro- 
hibition in Plautus to present subjunctives ex- 
pressing the same idea was 7: 6 or 6.98: 6; and 
whether the student of the Georgics knew the 
fragments of Junius Nipsus or not. It was a 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 51 

trifle tedious at times, and he found himself 
wondering what there was about learning that 
it should be so stupid. He was the least bit 
surprised to find that it seemed expected that he 
would wonder; for it was explained to him more 
than once that it was all for the best, and he 
would soon get used to it. Every fragment of 
truth was important, he was told, and the slightest 
contribution to knowledge a legacy of inestimable 
value, whatever its apparent insignificance; and 
besides, this was the way it was done in Germany. 
He soon learned that the appeal to Germany was 
considered final, and even made use of it himself 
when it came handy. 

But atmosphere and association work wonders. 
In time, he began to understand better the ideal 
which inspired his comrades and instructors. By 
the end of the first year, he was in a fair way 
to sympathize with them as well. During the 
second year he woke to the error of his ways, 
and became almost regenerate. There was, after 
all, something enthusing about accuracy, what- 



52- With the Professor 

ever the value of the material concerned; to do 
a thing absolutely right, to be able to defy criti- 
cism, v^as supremely satisfying. He conceded 
to his associates that mathematical accuracy in 
literary study as such was impossible: there was 
some excuse for their calling literary criticism 
"blue smoke." To be thorough, too, to do a 
thing once for all, was equally gratifying; and to 
possess a method which could be applied to 
knowledge as a lever to dead matter, or as a 
machine to raw material, was surely a triumph. 
That he was foregoing his own pleasure, and 
in a way sacrificing himself by slighting the lit- 
erary side of his subject, may also have contrib- 
uted in no slight degree to his change of attitude. 
To be one of the glorious company of martyrs 
to the cause of truth, avaricious of nothing ex- 
cept praise, was a blessed thought. He began 
rather to like the sight of his pallor, and, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, to cultivate the incipient 
stoop of his shoulders. The zeal of his house 
was soon eating him up. 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 53 

It was at this point that he laid the foundations 
of Sundry Suffixes in S. He didn't more than 
half like the subject at first, but he had to have 
one which could be scientifically developed — 
something which admitted of exhaustive treat- 
ment; something which had numerals in it and 
could therefore be definitely settled and disposed 
of; something, above all, which had not been 
written of before, in his own or any other lan- 
guage. 

The last condition was the hardest to fulfil, 
and was really what determined his choice; for 
everything which seemed worth while had al- 
ready been done, and he had to take what was 
available, regardless of his own tastes or of the 
value of the expected result. He was consoled, 
however, by his associates, who cheerfully told 
him to have no concern on that point, that not 
more than one in a thousand doctor's disserta- 
tions contained anything worth while, and that the 
main thing was to display method, thoroughness, 
and accuracy. To be sure, that sounded very 



54 With the Professor 

much like saying that it made no difference what 
the material of your house was, so long as the 
carpenter proved that he was master of his trade; 
but he could not afford to turn back, now that 
he had set his hand to the plow. 

The two years following the taking of his 
degree he spent in Germany. His professors 
would not hear of his stopping with his present 
equipment. There he got new light, made ad- 
denda to Suffixes in S, which he sent home to 
be published in his absence, and became interested 
in Consonantal Terminations. To make my 
story short, what with long association with men 
of scholarly ideals, continual application in the 
effort to satisfy them and himself, and, above all, 
the impressiveness of German achievement in 
scholarship, he had gradually become imbued with 
scholarly ideals himself, and had even become 
enthusiastic. He was another triumph of the 
System^ 

Fame had preceded him on the way home: 
his dissertation had been published, and the com- 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 55 

merits of reviewers were all that could be desired. 
As he had hoped, they praised his method, his 
thoroughness, and his accuracy. That they said 
nothing of the intrinsic value of his work, he 
hardly noticed. He was full of the pride of 
scholarly achievement, and when his beloved Alma 
Mater extended a call to him, he tasted the joys 
of success, sweeter to him than honey in the 
honeycomb. His long period of labor had been 
rewarded, and he was about to enter upon the 
life-work of which he had so long dreamed. 
He accepted the call, stipulating, of course, 
that he be given the work in Terence. If 
his mission in the world was to be fulfilled, 
Consonantal Terminations must have every en- 
couragement. 

The Professor felt keenly the responsibility of 
his position. As he remembered it, the atmo- 
sphere of his Alma Mater had not been scholarly. 
His venerable friend the Latin professor he had 
gradually come to think of as lacking in accuracy 
and thoroughness. The Professor could not re- 



56 With the Professor 

member ever having been taught about the Atel- 
lanse or Togatse when he read comedy with him, 
or having heard him refer to Ribbeck's Frag- 
menta. He was plainly behind the times, though 
perhaps useful in certain ways. The institution 
and the department needed a standard-bearer of 
scholarship. 

So the Professor had raised the standard and 
begun his march. He set out to cultivate the 
scientific temper among his students, and to set 
an example to his colleagues. His accuracy was 
wonderful, his conciseness a marvel, his delibera- 
tion unfailing, his thoroughness halted before no 
obstacle, his method was faultless. His recita- 
tions were grave and severe in manner and con- 
tent. He never stooped to humor, for scholar- 
ship was a jealous goddess. On one occasion, 
after the first of two public lectures on Latin 
Comedy, when someone very deferentially sug- 
gested that the next lecture would perhaps prove 
more attractive if he livened it up with a joke 
or a story now and then, "What!" cried the 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 57 

Professor, " do you mean that I am to lend myself 
to the prostitution of scholarship?" 

In class, he prescribed note-books and topics, 
and set his students to counting and classifying 
terminations. He also had them collect material 
to aid him on his new theory of the Subjunctive 
of Suggestibility, and required them to prepare 
abstracts of articles in the Journals of Metrology, 
Archeology, and Philology. He advocated and 
carried in faculty meeting a measure providing 
for a thesis requirement, and brought about many 
other changes inspired by love for the System. 

The Professor didn't realize it for some time, 
but the fact was that his bearing was dignified 
to the point of ponderosity, and his classroom 
utterances on even those subjects which most 
roused his enthusiasm were measured and formal 
to the extent of frigidity. His students were 
compliant, and executed his commands — they 
were Western students — but they did so wonder- 
ingly, and on the basis of faith rather than reason. 

Absorbed in his consonantal chase, the Pro- 



58 With the Professor 

fessor for a long time took it for granted that 
his students were as much inspired as he himself 
by the ideals set before them. He was not stupid, 
however; it was only five years since he had sat 
in those same seats, and after several months he 
could not fail to note the look of bland wonder 
on the faces of the girls, and the incipient ex- 
pression of weariness on the faces of the boys, 
whenever he mentioned his favorite subject. The 
former were possessed by a kind of childlike 
amazement that one small head could carry all 
he knew, the latter by an indifference which was 
saved from being disgust only by a mild convic- 
tion that the Professor was something less than 
absolutely right in his mentality. Among them- 
selves they referred to him as Terminations, occa- 
sionally lengthened to Interminable Terminations. 
Being really sympathetic and sensitive, the Pro- 
fessor noticed more and more the glances of his 
students. Once he detected two of them simul- 
taneously touching their foreheads, and passing 
a significant wink. This came as a shock, and 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 59 

set him vigorously to thinking. It began to sug- 
gest itself to him increasingly that what was so 
fascinating to him might not be even mildly in- 
teresting to younger people who had not enjoyed 
his advantages of study and association. He 
couldn't help harking back to his own under- 
graduate days, the memory of which had been 
obscured by his experiences of the past years. 
He remembered the uplift he had received, and 
yet he recalled from his courses in Sophocles and 
Terence nothing about terminations or constitu- 
tional antiquities or codexes. The plays them- 
selves had been the thing, and his teacher's method 
had been merely, first, to see that he could trans- 
late his lessons, and then to illumine them by 
drawing on the wealth of his own rich garner 
of knowledge and experience. The effect had 
been spiritual, not mechanical; literature had 
seemed to be translated into life. 

The Professor did not abate his zeal, however. 
He persisted in his course to the end of the year; 
for, was he not fostering scholarship, and was 



6o With the Professor 

not that his mission? Whether students were 
interested or enthused was not his immediate 
concern; his duty was to serve his mistress, and 
to trust her to make her own appeal. He dis- 
missed with disdain a budding incHnation to 
popularize. Of all things that were in heaven 
above, or that were in the earth beneath, or that 
were in the water under the earth, the System 
had impressed him that the worst was to be pop- 
ular. 

But he thought a great deal during the summer 
vacation, nevertheless. It is true, he did not 
allow himself to debate: that would have been 
treason to scholarship; but not even the all- 
absorbing Terminations kept him from being 
disturbed by a vague and undefined unrest. The 
result was that, with some little hurt to his con- 
science — his Scholarly conscience, I mean — he 
set fewer and simpler tasks during the following 
year, and obtruded Terminations with less fre- 
quency. 

During the next summer he was engaged on 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 6i 

M, and his progress was slower. His unrest was 
no longer vague and undefined, but vivid and in- 
sistent, a factor in every day's experience. By 
the time he reached R, the following year, the 
serpent of doubt reared its ugly head and not only 
attacked the Professor's scientific method in the 
classroom, but laid siege to Consonantal Termi- 
nations in their very citadel. He spoke of it to 
no one, of course. The only manifestation of 
his waywardness was in the gradual encroach- 
ment of geniality and humor upon the domain 
of the scientific method in his lectures and reci- 
tations. He came to the classroom with fewer 
notes and more smiles and spontaneity, talked 
more zmth his students, and less to them. Once 
or twice he was thrilled by the realization of an 
ancient ambition; he saw faces light up with the 
divine fire of enthusiasm for great art, just as 
he knew his had once lighted up, and he felt the 
joy of having put something rich into human 
life. 

But Guilt followed him when he left the class- 



62 With the Professor 

room. He was on the road to treason, against 
his will. He fought off doubt again and again, 
unwilling to part with the Olympian calm that 
sprang from the assurance that in holding to his 
course he was doing the supremely worth while. 
Often, indeed, he succeeded in reconvincing him- 
self. The sight of his name in the learned peri- 
odicals, letters from his colleagues in other insti- 
tutions, the coming of some eniditissimus Roma- 
norum to deliver a lecture in his community — 
revived his spirit, and cast the old glamor once 
more over Terminations. 

It must have occurred to you before this that 
the Professor was really a duality. He himself 
recognized the fact in time. He was Mr. Homo 
and Dr. Scholarship : the natural man with gen- 
uine and wholesome impulses, and the artificial 
Product of a System; and Mr. Homo, long brow- 
beaten into subjection, and venturing only now 
and then to reassert himself, was now clamoring 
aloud for full measure of recognition. The Pro- 
fessor saw that the day was near in the valley 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 63 

of decision, and that there could be no peace 
of mind for him until he should have entered 
into and emerged therefrom. 

This was his state of mind on the particular 
evening on which we caught our first glimpse 
of him in his room. Mr. Homo was rebellious 
in the extreme, and insisted on debate and de- 
cision once for all, threatening to fly in the face 
of Dr. Scholarship. The Professor threw down 
his pen in despair, leaned back and put his feet 
on the table in the midst of the sacred manu- 
script, and invited them to have it out. It was 
the first time he had really surrendered to the 
demands of his natural self for an impartial 
consideration of the question. 

" Confound him, anyway, with his solemn- 
faced ways ! " impetuously began Mr. Homo, 
who, not having had the benefit of the System, 
was less self -controlled than his enemy. " Who 
or what is he that you make so much fuss over 
him? What good is he to anyone? Tell me, 
will you? — if you can! " Mr. Homo addressed 



64 With the Professor 

himself directly to the Professor; for Dr. Scholar- 
ship, he knew, considered himself above argu- 
ment. 

The Professor consequently answered for his 
learned protege. Of course, he felt bound to 
manifest some indignation, especially as he was 
secretly fond of Mr. Homo, whose genial and 
direct ways he had always liked, and was guiltily 
conscious that he was inclined to agree with 
him. 

" What ! " he exclaimed irritably. " Don't you 
believe in scholarship at all ? " 

"That isn't what I said," replied Mr. Homo. 
" What I'm talking about is your version of it — 
your darling Terminations over there. I want 
to know what excuse they have for existence? 
Come, now, who's the better for them? 
Your students, I suppose ! " There was iron in 
his voice. 

The Professor had to concede that five years' 
experience had taught him that it was better for 
Terminations to keep away from his classroom. 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 65 

"Well, then," went on Mr. Homo, "if not 
your students, whose ? " 

The Professor considered a moment; he could 
see no reason why what was repellent and use- 
less when set before his own students should be 
of benefit to the students of anyone else; and 
he was, to tell the truth, possessed of a lively 
doubt that Terminations would ever be introduced 
to the notice of other students. He was thinking 
of certain pet theories of his learned friends which 
his students had never heard of. He was silent. 

" Then whom do they benefit, and whom will 
they benefit? The people at large? Nonsense! 
Whom then?" 

" The Scholars of the country," said the Pro- 
fessor, proudly, with letters and reviews in mind ; 
and added, haughtily : " You know I don't pre- 
tend to write for the common run of mankind." 

Mr. Homo looked him squarely in the eye. 
" Very well. How many scholars are you writing 
for? " he queried. 

The Professor was honest. He considered a 



66 With the Professor 

while, and did not dare to place the number of 
those interested in his line of investigation at 
more than two score. 

"And how many of the two score/' broke in 
Mr. Homo eagerly, " are you sure will read your 
work through, or ever refer to it again if they 
do?'* 

Here the Professor's glance happened to fall 
on the heap of uncut books, dissertations, and 
reprints lying in the corner. He reflected that 
his knowledge of ninety-nine out of a hundred 
of the products of scholarship was limited to 
what he read in reviews of them, and that the 
reviews themselves usually paid more attention 
to misprints and technical errors than to really 
significant qualities. He saw that it was easily 
possible that Terminations would never be read 
by anyone except the friends who would " kindly 
consent " to read the proof in return for his 
gratitude, which he would manifest by giving 
them advertising space in the preface. Possibly 
there might be added a reviewer or two; though 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 67 

he knew something of their methods, and didn't 
feel sure of them. 

He confessed his thoughts like a man. 

" Then see what you are doing," pursued Mr. 
Homo, with merciless logic. " Here you have 
spent five years in becoming a scholar, and five 
more in a professor's chair. During all the first 
five, you neglected the much coveted privilege of 
enriching your mind and soul for the sake of 
learning how to be accurate, exhaustive, and 
methodical in the treatment of mere lumber; and 
during most of the last five, you have been robbing 
yourself of physical, intellectual, and spiritual 
growth, and cheating your classes out of the 
inspiration which your institution meant you to 
give them, and which you yourself are secretly 
convinced is worth more than anything else they 
can get. And for what? To write something 
for a half-dozen men to glance at and consign to 
a dusty heap like that of yours in the corner. 
Whatever good it does stops right there with 
those few individuals — without reaching either 



68 With the Professor 

students or people, or contributing one iota to- 
ward making life more abundant. Waste, waste, 
absolute waste ! " Mr. Homo's temperature was 
rising. 

" But, my dear man," remonstrated the Pro- 
fessor, " you are unreasonable. There is waste 
in all production. Think of manufacturing pro- 
cesses. Think of the countless pages of scribbling 
and the scant body of real literature. Why, even 
Nature herself is wasteful ! '' The System had 
taught him this argument. 

" All of which may be true," replied Mr. Homo, 
" without proving that waste is desirable, or that 
it is justifiable when it may be avoided." 

" But my work is not waste ! I insist on it," 
said the Professor. " It is a model of scholarly 
method, and will contribute to the spirit of 
scholarly activity. The nation needs it. Think 
of Germany! If everyone should take your ad- 
vice, there would be no scholarship at all ! " This 
was the best argument the System possessed. 

But Mr. Homo knew very little of the argu- 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 69 

merits of the System. " That's where youVe way 
off," he said. His language was not always Sys- 
tematically dignified. *' I am not objecting to 
effort over something worth while, nor even to 
a reasonable amount of training as a means to 
an end. But I am objecting to the confusion of 
means and end, to the publication of books and 
articles on trivial subjects which have interest 
for few people, and value for none at all. I am 
objecting to the sham of writing merely for the 
sake of writing, and to the pretense of scholar- 
ship for the sake of gratifying personal vanity, 
receiving calls to coveted positions, or ministering 
to the greed of book concerns. I am objecting to 
the fraud of a system which treats the most im- 
portant of the humanities as if it were the most 
material instead of the most spiritual of subjects; 
and, by inordinately emphasizing the trivial un- 
known, encourages the neglect of the great field 
of the known and approved. Here are hundreds 
of graduate students spending nine-tenths of their 
time in learned trifling over unliterary detail, and 



70 With the Professor 

calling it scholarship; while not one out of ten 
of them has yet read all of his Horace or Virgil, 
or could give an intelligent account of their sig- 
nificance in universal literary history, to say noth- 
ing of making them attractive to a class. Have 
you read your Virgil within the past five years? 
Have you ever read Homer through, or Tasso, or 
Dante, or Milton? There, never mind, I don*t 
want to embarrass you ! " 

" Am I then to contribute nothing to scholar- 
ship?" cried the Professor. "Is my life to be 
fruitless in the great cause?" 

" Oh, dear me, no ! Not at all ! " Mr. Homo 
reassured him. " You may be a scholar yet, but 
don*t think that you must do it right away. You 
are not ripe for it now. What are you about, 
anyway, trying to write books at thirty? One 
might think you had some great message for the 
world ! Bless your heart, you don't know enough 
yet to write anything worth putting into print! 
You haven't lived enough or thought enough to 
possess real knowledge. Haven't I heard you 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 71 

quote from Horace that the beginning and source 
of good writing is to know? What you have on 
those sheets there [the Professor had involun- 
tarily glanced at Terminations in T] isn't knowl- 
edge — any more than a neat pile of bricks is 
architecture. Shall I give you some good ad- 
vice?" 

The Professor nodded assent, and tried to 
frown as he did so. He liked Mr. Homo's sin- 
cerity and fearlessness, but the System was still 
strong enough with him to restrain him from 
open confession. 

" Well, then," continued his mentor, " drop this 
nonsense ! " He pointed toward Terminations. 
" Don't imagine that what you are engaged in is 
German scholarship. It isn't; it's only a cheap 
imitation. Don't write books until you have 
something to write about; real German scholar- 
ship doesn't. And don't fancy that the writing 
of books on such subjects as that of yours is the 
only form of scholarship, or is necessarily scholar- 
ship at all. To be able to commune with the 



72 With the Professor 

souls of the world's great poets — who are, after 
all, the world's greatest creative scholars — and 
to interpret their message to humanity, is a higher 
form of scholarship than the capacity for collec- 
tion and arrangement of data about them. That 
is the work of a mechanician, and requires in- 
genuity rather than intellect. It doesn't really 
take brains to do that. Remember that you are 
a teacher of literature, and that the very highest 
form of creative scholarship in literature is to 
produce new combinations in thought and lan- 
guage, just as in chemistry it is to discover new 
combinations of chemicals. If you cannot create, 
the next best is to interpret and transmit. Don't 
fancy, too, that there is no scholarship except 
what appears in print. If there can be sermons 
in stones and books in the running brooks, all 
the more can there be scholarship in human per- 
sonality. Hearken to my commandments, and 
your peace shall be as a river. Fill your head 
and your heart with the riches of our literary 
heritage, so that out of the abundance of the 



Dr. Scholarship and Mr. Homo 73 

heart your mouth shall speak. Inspire, and point 
the way! Your old teacher was one of that kind 
— and to think that for a time you thought you 
knew more than he! He will be dead and gone 
years before you know as much as he knew ten 
years ago." 

The Professor himself had for some time grad- 
ually been coming to that conclusion, and felt no 
resentment at the words. Nor was this his only 
change of opinion. The truth was, Mr. Homo 
had only summed up in convincing manner the 
Professor's most intimate cogitations for the past 
year or two. His conviction and conversion were 
only the natural result of a long process. The 
trammels of the System should no longer be on 
him. Nature, the good friend whom the pitch- 
fork of the System had expelled, should hence- 
forth be allowed a voice in the direction of his 
effort. He would know more of great books, 
of men, of life; his tongue and pen should flow 
from inspiration as well as industry; he would tell 
not only what was, but what it meant. 



74 With the Professor 

He rose and gathered together his material 
on Consonantal Terminations, carried it over to 
the corner of the room, and deposited it with 
the heap of reprints. Then he turned out the 
light and started to leave the room, but on second 
thought went back and picked up the sheets again, 
and put them in the fireplace. By the cheerful 
light they gave, he removed to the dusty shelves 
of his closet all the apparatus on Terminations 
which covered the table and loaded the revolving 
case, and set in its place his favorite poets, novel- 
ists, historians, and essayists, glowing with pleas- 
ure at the promise of the future. 



CHAPTER III 
MUD AND NAILS 

The Professor had been greatly diverted by 
certain utterances of his two Httle daughters. 
One was eight, slender and dark, with something 
of the Peruginesque Saint in her features; the 
other, five, with eyes big and blue and hair all 
gold, a well-fed, boisterous little pagan with Vene- 
tian exuberance of flesh and color. They were, 
to be sure, a trifle unlike in temperament, but, 
after all, the principal ground of their dissimilar- 
ity lay in the superior education of the Saint; 
she had been in school two years, and had learned 
a few of the old Greek stories. 

Sitting before the fireplace one evening with the 

Professor, who from time to time replenished 

the blaze with the dry and half-rotten remains 

of the old lawn fence, which had become un- 

75 



76 With the Professor 

fashionable as well as useless — lawn fences had 
gradually gone out of style in the community 
as one professor after another, under the pressure 
of saeva necessitas, had deferred the reconstruc- 
tion of his own — they were seeing things in the 
crackling embers. She of the saintly aspect, gaz- 
ing with eyes of reverie into the glowing mass 
of half-consumed wreckage, had suddenly ex- 
claimed, '* I see Hercules with his club ! " where- 
upon the golden-haired one, roused to emulation, 
had cried out, hoarsely, " I see nails ! " On the 
day before, too, as they were playing about the 
old postholes in the lawn, the Professor had heard 
them cry out, the one, triumphantly, '' I see Per- 
seus and the Gorgon ! " and the other, a trifle 
belated and embarrassed, " I see mud ! " 

Of course, being a college professor — and a 
trifle old-fashioned, too, in spite of his compara- 
tive youth — he had seized upon the incident with 
the homiletic instinct, mentally giving it a label, 
and put it in the appropriate place in his moral 
card-catalogue. The more he reviewed it, the 



Mud and Nails 77 

more he felt that his Httle daughters had uncon- 
sciously reflected the two great varieties of the 
human kind — those who see the circumstances of 
life as mere MUD and NAILS, blinded to the 
essence of things by what in them is real, tangible, 
and practical ; and those who are happily deluded 
into seeing the essential by not being able to see 
things as they seem to be. The latter variety, it 
seemed to the Professor, were greatly in the 
minority; he had but a limited number of ac- 
quaintances who saw poetry in life, whereas the 
number of people who saw no farther than mud 
and nails seemed to him infinite. 

He could not find it in his heart to blame them 
— the practical was so obtrusive and insistent, 
and visible creation so easy to see. He sympa- 
thized with them more than he would at all times 
have cared to confess. The fact was, the mud 
and nails of his own existence were plentiful 
enough, and gave him no slight trouble. He 
never could tell when they would insist on being 
looked at in all their ugliness. They were his 



78 With the Professor 

unbidden guests at many a feast; he was never 
entirely safe from them. He felt as apprehensive 
of them and as helpless before them as one feels 
who has taken the Daughter of the Vine to 
Spouse, and expects at every moment the return 
of the fabled enemies of the mother of mankind. 

The Professor had them again today. It was 
a blue Monday, in October — it rained, and the 
wind was never weary; at every gust the dead 
leaves whirled against the window-panes — one 
of those gloomy, cold, rainy Mondays when the 
tears of Nature, though more visible to the world, 
were hardly more numerous than the droppings 
from the eyes of her coeducational daughters 
(perhaps of her sons as well) in the secluded 
rooms of the Latin quarter. The Professor was 
sitting in his study, alone. It was a long time 
since he himself had contributed to the moisture 
of blue Monday — ^he had been a freshman fifteen 
years before — ^but he was no stranger to the in- 
fluences of the day. 

It was so gloomy that the Professor could 



Mud and Nails 79 

hardly see the page, and he was so under the 
baneful influence that he could not keep his mind 
on its contents anyway, so he laid his book down 
and gave himself completely over to the impulse 
which had been assailing him with more or less 
persistence all day. He had been studying a bit 
of Milton with his class that morning, with results 
that seemed to him the last straw. There had 
been a distinguished visitor present, and the stu- 
dents had done their worst. He could forgive 
their stumbling over meter, and even their bar- 
barous mispronunciation of proper names — they 
had never had even small Latin, and of course 
less Greek was out of the question under those 
circumstances, and the Professor knew from ex- 
perience that the major portion of English litera- 
ture, or of any other great literature, would al- 
ways be a dead letter to them. 

But they had gone farther than that, and out- 
raged him by displaying a degree of ignorance in- 
comprehensible even to anyone acquainted with 
their daily ways, to say nothing of one who, 



8o With the Professor 

like the distinguished visitor, had been in college 
before shoddy education came into vogue; they 
had not known who Miltiades was, or who fought 
the battle of Marathon; had told him, in uncer- 
tain tones which betrayed an interrogative atti- 
tude, that Adam was the first murderer — had 
killed his brother Cain; that Amphion was a two- 
handled measure containing about a bushel; and 
had asked him whether the quotation " five times 
received I forty stripes save one," which he had 
inadvertently used — he was always forgetting 
that scriptural quotations were mystifying — ^had 
anything to do with Ali Baba and the Forty 
Thieves. 

And as if that were not enough for one day, 
when he got home after his recitations he found 
awaiting him a letter from a graduate of his 
college — asking for references, of course; he 
rarely heard from his former students unless they 
wanted something — a letter displaying the usual 
evidences of simplified and individual taste in 
spelling and punctuation, and with more than 



Mud and Nails 8i 

the usual innocence of anything even faintly sug- 
gesting style — just mud and nails, that was 
all. 

Then came the weather with its gloom, and the 
Professor gave it up, sank back in his chair, and 
prepared to be as comfortably miserable as pos- 
sible. He knew he would get over the attack, 
for he had had attacks like it before. Besides, 
he was a Horatian, and his Horace had taught 
him that the heart well fortified with wisdom 

Sperat infestis, metuit secundis 
Alteram sortem, 

and that Jupiter drove away bad weather as well 
as brought it; that Apollo was not forever aim- 
ing his shafts, but sometimes paused to touch up 
the lyre, and that, even if the outlook was hope- 
less at times, it would not be always so. He 
knew that Nature's soft nurse would knit up the 
raveled sleave of his care, and that the poetry 
of his profession was likely to be visible again 
on the morrow. So hail, divinest Melancholy! 



82 With the Professor 

He would let the current sweep him where it 
would for that afternoon. 

For the Professor was very much like men in 
other walks of life, and occasionally had his 
doubts as to the wisdom he had displayed in the 
choice of a profession. Not that he felt better 
qualified to succeed in some other profession: 
indeed he suspected that there was a great deal 
of truth in the popular view that a real college 
professor was fit for nothing else, and never could 
have been. That was not it. It was not his own 
fitness so much as the profession itself that he 
doubted. 

The fact was that, even in his short teaching 
experience of ten years, he had grown so familiar 
with the processes and results of what was called 
education, and so unfamiliar with the activities 
of other occupations, that he sometimes mildly 
wondered whether he was after all moving in a 
sphere of real usefulness like other men. The 
thought disturbed him. Qui fit, Maecenas? 
Ought he not rather to have been a tradesman. 



Mud and Nails 83 

or a soldier — quid enim? concurritiir — or a 
farmer, or a lawyer, or a grocer, or dry goods 
clerk— in a word, a member of some calling whose 
duties were clearly defined, whose success could 
be measured and expressed in mathematical terms, 
and for which he need offer no apology to the 
matter-of-fact world about him? If he must be 
a professor, ought he not to have chosen at least 
some subject classed as vital or practical or use- 
ful — engineering, for example, or agriculture, or 
domestic science? 

But here he was, lecturing on literature — and 
poetry, at that, — which his country's foremost 
realist called " soft." He had gone through 
the college course with zeal and enthusiasm, and 
with perfect faith that he was deriving benefit 
commensurate with the enjoyment he experienced. 
Not content with that preparation, he had spent 
two years in graduate work at home, and two 
years more abroad. He had begun to teach with 
implicit confidence in his ability to impart knowl- 
edge, and in the ability of his students to receive 



84 With the Professor 

it. He was still young. Yet here he was, full 
of vigor in the pursuit of a calling which he en- 
joyed and to which he felt himself adapted, a 
prey to skepticism, entertaining strange thoughts, 
which were certainly not angelic, unawares. 

Could it be, after all, that his faith had been 
misplaced — that the value of education was over- 
estimated, and greatly so ? He remembered hav- 
ing read the assertion of an English observer 
to the effect that education was the great national 
fetich of the United States. He thought of the 
motley crowd in his own and other institutions 
with which he was acquainted — of the thousands 
of aimless young men and women floating along 
in the current of the college course simply be- 
cause report had it that education was a good 
thing; of the thousands more who worked hard 
first to gain entrance and then to remain, and 
whose case was hopeless because of natural dull- 
ness and deficiency; of the throngs — some stupid 
and some talented — who were unambitious; of the 
idlers who came to get culture through being in 



Mud and Nails 85 

the college atmosphere, and whose joys and sor- 
rows were almost all inseparably connected with 
fraternity and sorority life. 

All these, he saw, were in college principally 
because of their own or their parents' participa- 
tion in the popular faith in education. There were 
a few, he felt, more mature and more intelligent, 
who could no doubt with reasons have answered 
him; but they were indeed few — for had he not 
received letters from the brightest of his former 
students, now teachers, imploring him to supply 
them with arguments to employ against skeptics 
and scoffers who were forever asking " What 
was the use " of literature and language? They 
had faith, to be sure, but it was a faith for the 
most part grounded in the fashion of the time. 
Not one of them had ever really formulated its 
reasons. 

The national faith, too, was fostered by na- 
tional prosperity. Everybody believed in educa- 
tion of some sort, and nearly everybody could 
afford it. The roll of college students had 



86 With the Professor 

doubled and tripled in a half -score of years, but 
the Professor could not escape the conviction 
that the number of intended amphorae which came 
out pots as the course rolled round had increased 
beyond all proportion. Yes, he felt inclined to 
agree with his English friend: education cer- 
tainly did look like a national fetich. 

Nevertheless, he thought, better that for a 
fetich than something less worthy. But the un- 
fortunate thing about it was that, in common with 
all other fetich-worship, it had a distinctly earthy 
end in view — as earthy as that of any primitive 
worship whose devotees bowed down and sac- 
rificed in order either to avert the wrath or win 
the favor of deity. The national faith in educa- 
tion was to be defined as the substance of things 
hoped for not less than as the evidence of things 
not seen. Knowledge is Power, was its watch- 
word, and its syllogism was : Knowledge is power : 
power is material gain; therefore, knowledge is 
material gain. Therefore, get an education, and 
put money in thy purse : follow thou the college 



Mud and Nails 87 

course. Hence the conflict of ideals which poi- 
soned the whole system. Education was desirable 
because of what it would bring — I say, put money 
in thy purse — but it was also undesirable because 
it deferred realization. Faith said it was a good 
thing to have, but impatience said 'twere well 
it were had quickly. Let the process be speedy. 

The Professor thought of the haste of young 
men to enter into the practice of the professions: 
of striplings who wanted to practise medicine 
at the age of twenty-three, or who thought it a 
waste of time to take the college course ante- 
cedent to legal or theological training — as though 
the world could afford to trust its property, its 
body, or its soul to a boy not yet able to com- 
prehend the substance of Milton or Tennyson, 
to say nothing of appreciating their esthetic qual- 
ities. 

Then he thought of the results — of the hosts 
of third- and fourth-rate lawyers w^ho never 
would be first-rate lawyers, not to say Marshalls 
or Websters; of the physicians who never would 



88 With the Professor 

be more than mere practitioners, to say nothing 
of OHver Wendell Holmeses; of the young men 
entering upon public life who would never be 
Gladstones or Hays; of the illogical and ungram- 
matical preachers he had heard; of the narrow, 
unenlightened, mechanical teachers he had seen 
who dealt daily with the greatest products of 
culture without really knowing what culture was; 
of the leaders in educational methods who knew 
culture principally as a machine-made product 
consisting of so many facts from arithmetic, ge- 
ometry, and natural science, so many rules of 
English grammar, so many memorized standard 
poems, so many familiarized prose masterpieces, 
and who were always dazed when they met with 
anything which had not entered into their own 
particular recipe for education; of the veneered 
business men and society women he had mingled 
with among the " best people of the town." Some 
of them had rushed through college with the 
greatest speed possible, some with the greatest 
ease possible, and all with the greatest possible 



Mud and Nails 89 

attention to such subjects as seemed to themselves 
— college faculties no longer presumed to know 
better than students what was good for them — 
to have a direct bearing upon their future occu- 
pations. 

You may know by this that the Professor was 
in the College of Liberal Arts. Had he been 
in one of the other colleges of his institution 
he would have had less cause for despair, for 
in them he had noticed that ideals were somewhat 
more nearly realized tlian in his own. At the 
commencement exercises a few years before, he 
had heard the dean of one of them announce 
that every graduate of his school had a position 
awaiting him as soon as he could obtain his 
diploma and present himself. The Professor had 
rather expected the heads of other colleges to 
inform the public, with equal self-satisfaction, 
that all of their graduates would be occupying 
lucrative positions behind soda fountains next 
day, or that the great corporations, the book con- 
cerns, the dairies and cheese factories^ and the 



90 With the Professor 

restaurants and hotels of the state, were all wait- 
ing in breathless suspense to recruit from their 
graduates the attorneys, agents, butter- and 
cheese-makers, and chefs and waiters in their 
employ. He forgave them the omission. 

But in his own college the disparity between 
ideals and actual achievement was so enormous 
that such moods as the one in which he now 
labored were not to be wondered at. The aim 
of his college was to produce a cultivated lady or 
gentleman ready to enter a chosen calling or 
course of training with not only a certain amount 
of definite knowledge, but also with a degree of 
appreciation and taste, of power of mind, and 
of sense of method such as would insure their 
growth into the best of which they were capable, 
and possibly into the best of their time, or even 
of all time. They were to be the Shakespeares 
and Ciceros, the Wagners and Michelangelos and 
Phidiases of their day, if it was in them, or as 
far as it was in them; the sordidness of practical 
problems was not to claim them so soon as to 



Mud and Nails 91 

prejudice their destiny. They were to have the 
best, and to do their best. It might be that 

Our best is bad, nor bears thy test; 
Still it should be our very best. 

Yet the results were dismaying: the Professor 
had to recognize the fact every day. Few of his 
students entertained the ideals he set before them. 
They, too, to tell the truth, like the other colleges, 
and partly because of their presence, were after 
the substance of the world. A great majority of 
them intended to teach, and prospective teachers, 
the Professor had found, were after all just as 
much in a hurry to enter into the world of money- 
getting as lawyers and engineers. Recommenda- 
tions to teach, and positions, were the prizes about 
which their efforts centered. As for those who 
were not to enter the profession of teaching, the 
greater part stood with one foot in the College 
of Liberal Arts and the other in law, or com- 
merce, or domestic science, or medicine. What 
few were not in that case were anxious, if not 
for a short cut, for an easy one. 



92 With the Professor 

Was the fault all in method and environment? 
The Professor's gloomy spirit told him to-day 
that it was in the material, too. He indulged in 
a mathematical calculation. In his department 
there were six hundred freshmen. They had 
come from hundreds of high schools and acade- 
mies scattered over a fertile and growing state. 
With some show of reason it could be assumed 
that they represented the best talent of these 
preparatory schools; and as these in turn could 
fairly be said to consist of the choicest material 
from thousands of common schools, it could also 
be assumed that the Professor and his associates 
had to do with the picked men and women from 
scores of thousands of the young people of the 
state. Every effort to cultivate their powers was 
put forth, and the process had been going on for 
years. 

One might naturally expect, he thought, that 
so vast and orderly a machine of education 
might in time, if not beget, at least discover by 
chance some heart pregnant with celestial fire. 



Mud and Nails 93 

That training had failed to produce the great re- 
sult, however, he well knew; the most noticeable 
outcome of the whole process was the inability of 
the average senior to write a letter which did not 
trangress the laws of orthography and taste a 
half-dozen times on a page, even if it contained 
ideas sufficient to fill so great a space. And as 
for hearts with celestial fire, and hands to wake 
to ecstasy the living lyre, out of the thousands 
who had come and gone within his own memory 
not one had proved even ordinarily Musis 
amicus. 

He had almost given up looking for geniuses. 
It gave him pleasure now to find students who 
could comprehend literature, to say nothing of 
creating it. He thought of the other humanities, 
too — he had once taught a little Latin and Greek 
— of phrases barbarous in sound as well as in- 
comprehensible in meaning, punctuated with 
groanings which could not be uttered; of whole 
passages rendered into jargon absolutely devoid 
of a shred of meaning by pupils who went on with 



94 With the Professor 

their heartbreaking performance as if they had 
uttered the sublime sense which the original v/as 
intended to convey. They had spelled her name 
" Dianna/' and called her the god of death, told 
him that the Centaurs and Chimeras were Ger- 
man tribes conquered by Augustus, called Dola- 
bella the goddess of peace, Aristides the goddess 
of the " chace," Andromache a Greek hero of 
Troy, Astyanax an island " somewhere in the 
Mediterranean," and defined " Soractus " as an 
intimate friend of Horace to whom he expounded 
the carpe diem idea. According to one of them. 
Pilgrim's Progress was " one of the sources of 
New England history.'* From a set of about 
twenty examination papers he had acquired the 
edifying information that Penelope was the Muse 
of history, the wife of Achilles, the Trojan Helen 
stolen by Agamemnon, the goddess of wine, mirth, 
and the like, the mother of Proserpina, one of 
the Muses who presided over lyric poetry, and 
" a kind of wine-jar." Peste! Much had he 
travailed in the realms of mud and nails ! 



Mud and Nails 95 

Was it worth while, after all — all this 
machinery of education, with its tremendous 
w^aste and inferior output? Even supposing its 
product fairly up to the ideal, what of it? Did 
education make men live longer? Did it make 
their digestion better? Did it make them hap- 
pier than other men or other animals ? The Pro- 
fessor looked down at old Aristides, the pet of 
the household, sleek, well-fed, and warm, purring 
contentedly beside the waste-basket. The Pro- 
fessor knew well that he himself felt only rarely 
as Aristides felt eleven twelfths of the time. 
Why not be as the beasts of the field, and live in 
blissful ignorance of the woes of civilization? 
Why be civilized anyway ? Was not all this fuss 
about being dressed and keeping clean and know- 
ing things merely a notion after all ? Why not go 
as Nature intended, live in a hole in the ground, 
and eat roots and berries? At any rate, if we 
must have civilization, why the refinements of 
civilization? Why poetry? Why painting and 
sculpture? Why religion, or any other of the 



g6 With the Professor 

useless and impractical and vexatious things for 
which men struggled all through their miserable 
inconsequential little existences ? Why education, 
except for purely utilitarian ends, if at all ? 

The time was out of joint. O cursed spite 
That ever he was born to set it right! 

The violence of the Professor's conclusion 
shocked him into acute and dismaying conscious- 
ness of heresy. He called a halt on the thankless 
Muse — Qtw, Musa, tendisf Desine pervicax — 
and bent stern brows upon her : What, no educa- 
tion? Live like beasts of the field? Yes, she 
replied; just that. What's the use in education? 
Prove to me that it is a good, if you can. I defy 
you. 

Certainly, madame, said the Professor; for now 
that he had found someone who agreed with him 
and took for granted the very mud and nails 
he was contemplating, he began to veer. Cer- 
tainly. Education makes man a better member 
of society. 



Mud and Nails 97 

That may be true, she persisted, but is society- 
necessary? Why society? You amaze me, an- 
swered the Professor. Why, indeed, but to regu- 
late the relations of men to each other, to afford 
protection to the weak, and to make it possible 
for every human being to put forth his best 
effort? 

Yes, replied the Muse, but Nature regulates the 
affairs of other beings; why should man be an 
exception? Why should he alone be against her, 
and not for her, and do his best to defeat her 
efforts through what you call society ? She never 
intended the weak to survive — only the strong 
and the fit. She intended man simply to live, and 
eat, and die. 

Preposterous ! cried the Professor. What non- 
sense! What do you mean by Nature? Isn't 
human compassion as much a product of Nature 
as human brawn ? Isn't intellect as truly a natu- 
ral product as the appetite of a hog? Do you 
mean to say that Nature has not reared cities 
and governments among men as well as grown 



98 With the Professor 

fur on the backs of beasts? Don't be so 
narrow ! 

Yes, she replied, scornfully — and charity balls, 
and evening costume, and predigested food, and 
undigesting stomachs! 

The Professor scrutinized her countenance, not 
quite sure that she didn't mean that for humor. 
You see he thought she meant female evening 
dress, and he had never been able to credit it 
wholly either to Nature or Art, though the claim 
of Nature seemed on the whole slightly superior. 
Besides, her allusion to the stomach caught his 
attention — he was dieting that week under the 
direction of the Ladies' Home Companion, He 
had been acting on its various and varying sug- 
gestions for some time, and rather enjoyed the 
adventurous course. 

It is no wonder, then, that the Professor lost 
the thread of his argument for the moment. He 
began again, however, though somewhat weakly 
and irrelevantly: And besides, education makes 
men happier. 



Mud and Nails 99 

The Muse looked suggestively down at Aris- 
tides. In much wisdom is much grief; and he 
that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, she 
quoted. 

The Professor knew that, and could not help 
thinking of the Companion and its hints on diet. 
He, too, resorted to Scripture. Yes, he said, but 
he lives life more abundantly, and that is surely 
worth while, for the great Teacher Himself came 
to give us that. 

He didn't do it by present educational methods, 
though, she said with asperity. 

To be sure, said the Professor, but — and he 
was just about to deliver the substance of the 
last sermon he had heard — the hundred and 
twelfth on the subject since he had begun 
to record them — which had attempted to 
reconcile the practices of modern Christian 
society with the Hteral teachings of Christ. 
But the Muse anticipated him, and urged her 
point: Come now, she taunted him, where is 
your logic? You don't seem to be getting 



loo With the Professor 

on with your proof that education is a 
good. 

The Professor was getting desperate, and Im- 
patient as well. He had never heard such heresy 
uttered before, had never supposed that educa- 
tion was in need of apologists, and it irritated 
him to find someone who would not grant him the 
necessary premises. 

He had to appeal to a higher court. How do I 
know it is a good? Why, the course of history 
proves it ! 

But history may be wrong, was the reply. 

Then let it be wrong! said the Professor. My 
heart tells me that the cultivation of all my 
faculties is necessary, imperative. My soul 
thirsteth for it as for the living God. All history 
shows that the race has the instinct for knowledge 
divinely planted in it. 

The Muse knew there was no use arguing 
with a man who spoke with such fervor. She 
knew even better than a professor that reli- 
gious convictions are not proper matter for 



Mud and Nails loi 

argument; so she determined to concede a 
point. 

Well, let us grant that society, and all that, 
she said, is necessary, and that education is an 
ally of society; but what's the use of the higher 
education which you call culture? If you 
must have education and schools, why not 
teach your young people the elements: how 
to handle tools, cook meals, make clothes, 
shoot and ride, keep accounts, run railroad 
trains, and how to teach other generations 
to do the same? Why aren't you more 
practical ? 

The Professor was in a glow now. He forgot 
his former gloom for a moment. Practical! he 
cried. I maintain that it is practical to train up 
men and women to wide outlook and broad under- 
standing ! 

Oh, that's all very well, rejoined the Muse. 
But unless your culture has something to do with 
everyday life and results in something useful, 
what health is there in it? Come now, let us 



I02 With the Professor 

reason together. Can culture set to a leg? or an 
arm? or take away the grief of a wound? Can 
the surgeon do his work better knowing Paradise 
Lost or Gray's Elegy than he could if he had 
never heard of them? What is culture? a word. 
What is in that word culture ? air. Who hath it ? 
He that died o' Wednesday. Therefore, I'd ad- 
vise you to have none of it more than is necessary 
for the feeding and clothing of yourself and your 
family. 

The Professor was hot with indignation. It's 
plain to see that you are not Clio, he cried; and 
I don't believe you are even Zeus-born. You're 
a modern masquerader. If you had lived in an- 
tiquity, or if you knew the first thing about his- 
tory, you'd never utter such trash as that. Look 
here : tell me, if you can, what are the only things 
which have lasted through the ages? Are they 
the bridges built by engineers? There are only 
two bridges of note mentioned from antiquity — 
those of Caesar and Xerxes — and neither would 
be known were it not for the literary art. (The 



Mud and Nails 103 

Professor wasn't sure about the number, but he 
never did Hke to let the truth interfere with his 
rhetoric.) Varro knew a thousand times as 
many practical and useful facts as Cicero, and 
wrote them down; but they are lying in cold 
obstruction because they were not recorded in 
the language of an artist. Their very existence 
would be forgotten if pedantry did not occa- 
sionally resurrect notice of them. Do you sup- 
pose the fame of our own age two thousand 
years hence is going to rest upon the achieve- 
ments of commerce, or the height of our sky- 
scrapers, or the speed of our trains, or the number 
of our graduates, or the size of our circuses? 
What does the fame of past ages rest upon? 
You are only earth-born, after all. Go back and 
ask your nine ancient sisters — elder and wiser 
than you — whether it was the leather of Cleon 
the tanner that made Greece famous, or that im- 
practical temple on which Pericles had the state 
squander its money. Was it the bank account of 
Crassus or was it Cicero's eloquence that was 



I04 With the Professor 

worth while in the Roman Repubhc ? Don't you 
know that 

All passes. Art alone 

Enduring stays to us; 
The bust out-lasts the throne,— 

The Coin, Tiberius? 

What could you know about the history of the 
world without the literature, sculpture, painting, 
and architecture which antiquity left behind, and 
which men even in the most barbarous age re- 
spected for their beauty, hardly knowing why? 
What would be left of past ages if it were not for 
their devotion to that same impractical culture 
which you despise? Don't you understand that 
only what is practical is perishable, and what is 
impractical is eternal? The trouble with you is 
that you are too modern; you've been listening to 
people whose vision doesn't reach beyond the 
limits of their own township and their own cen- 
tury. What you need most is a little knowledge 
of history and a few other impractical subjects. 
You're narrow and bigoted and short-sighted. 



Mud and Nails 105 

Either the whole course of history is wrong and 
civilization is a farce, or I am right. My way- 
is the way of Nature, after all. 

The Muse felt that she couldn't stem that tide. 
She flew into a passion, flounced out of the room, 
and left the Professor in possession of the field. 
I'll not talk with you another single minute, so 
there! were her parting words. At least you 
will not find many to agree with you ! 

Yes, that might be so ; he expected to find com- 
paratively few; but he consoled himself out of 
his wisdom. There always had been compara- 
tively few. Man might be a thinking animal, but, 
after all, the literary animal, even the intellectual 
animal of any order, was a rare thing, and always 
had been. He thought of the few — the very few 
— great names which had survived from among 
the millions and millions who had trodden the 
globe and now were numbered with the tribes that 
slumbered in its bosom. Even in Athens, at a 
time for fecundity of intellect unexampled in the 
world's history, there had been only one great 



io6 With the Professor 

man in five thousand. What if his own age pro- 
duced only one in a million, or none at all? 
There had been such ages before. The leaven 
was nevertheless working; the soil was swelling 
the seed, and some day would come the bursting 
forth of the embryo, the springing of the plant, 
the apparition of the beautiful flower. For the 
flower of civilization was after all only art, and 
the whole creation groaned and travailed in the 
effort to produce it. 

Then let others insist that the hewing of wood 
and the drawing of water constituted the only 
serious and profitable business of life. These 
things had their place and their use, it was true; 
but for himself, he was about business far more 
important. Let the world call him and his ideals 
impractical ; it could see only mud and nails where 
he saw the angels of God ascending and descend- 
ing. Its slings and arrows mattered not; thrice- 
armed was he that had his quarrel |ust. He 
would continue to do what both intuition and 
reason told him was the supremely worth while. 



Mud and Nails 107 

And so the Professor concluded, as he had 
concluded many times before, and as he had 
known all along that he would conclude this 
time, to continue cheerfully on his way with 
faith that somehow good would be the final 
goal of ill, and not to go into real estate or life 
insurance, or open a commercial college. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PROFESSOR ASKS FOR MORE 

When the Professor picked up the December 
Parnassic and saw on its first page the title 
Riches: A Christmas Essay, of course he was 
unable to resist the peculiar fascination which 
such a subject has for his class, and began to 
read. Not that he had any business to be in- 
terested in such a topic, or that he was really or 
vitally interested in it ; but college professors, like 
small boys at holiday time, are sometimes given 
to gazing with distant eyes into the display win- 
dow of the world's glittering toys, and wondering 
what they would do if the kind fairy should sud- 
denly make her appearance and transport them to 
the realms of possession and enjoyment. He be- 
gan to read with only a mild and contemplative 

curiosity, knowing perfectly well the futility of 

io8 



The Professor Asks for More 109 

allowing himself to be concerned with a theme 
like that. 

But when the Professor came to the affirmation 
that heads of American families, with not more 
than four children, and with incomes of fifteen 
thousand dollars a year, had nearly as much 
money as was good for them, though fifteen 
thousand dollars a year was not riches, he sud- 
denly sat up, rubbed his eyes, and took a second 
look. 

Yes, there it was, fifteen thousand dollars — it 
had been no mistake of his vision. From that 
moment he was attentive. After convincing him- 
self of the accuracy of his senses, his first thought 
was that the author of the essay was meanly in- 
dulging in irony at the expense of simple people 

like himself, and he began to feel resentful 

But no, it was serious enough — " fifteen thousand 
dollars a year, though it was not riches (the italics 
are the Professor's), represented so nearly as 
much money as was good for the head of an 
American family with not more than four 



no With the Professor 

children that he could well afford to be par- 
ticular about what he did to make his income 
bigger." 

Here indeed was a fruitful theme for medita- 
tion! The Professor sank back in his chair, 
closed his eyes, and set his imagination to work; 
or rather, let it loose for a holiday, in the attempt 
to spend that fifteen thousand dollars a year which 
was not riches. His imagination was of the 
sober, steadfast, and demure kind, not accus- 
tomed to play, much less work, with material of 
such magnitude, and at first he found it some- 
what difficult to get it into action. 

After recovering from a momentary paralysis, 
however, it did fairly well. Fifteen thousand 
dollars a year! — he could have a home of his 
own, with calm Peace and Quiet, instead of in- 
habiting a Procrustean domicile which was for- 
ever interfering with both his physical and spirit- 
ual comfort; he could have his own shelves, and 
fill them with his own books, and be relieved of 
the necessity of either working amid the wooden 



The Professor Asks for More 1 1 1 

surroundings of the college library or carrying 
to and from it armfuls of borrowed volumes, if 
indeed it afforded him the works most needful; 
he could afford a cook, a nurse girl, and a maid to 
relieve his wife of the too great burden of house- 
hold care ; he could make more abundant provision 
for her future and that of their children by taking 
out another policy, and incidentally contribute a 
trifle more to the salary of his neighbor the life 
insurance president — ^he liked to do a good- 
natured thing; he could afford his sons and daugh- 
ters their fraternity and sorority expenses without 
depriving himself and their mother of ordinary 
comforts; he could even send them away to col- 
lege — to some faculty with which he was not so 
intimately acquainted, and in which he therefore 
placed greater confidence — and relieve both them 
and himself of embarrassment; he could be in- 
dependent in his choice of breakfast foods, and set 
his table with a view to health rather than econ- 
omy; or, following the reasoning of Mr. Dooley, 
to the effect that " 'tis not what y' ate that gives 



112 With the Professor 

y' th' indigistion — 'tis the rint," he could roll 
from his shoulders the anxieties of meeting the 
monthly bills, and escape the nervously prostrat- 
ing annoyance of being obliged to refuse his wife 
and daughters the quarterly bonnet and gown; 
he could afford a season in Europe once in a half 
dozen years (he had to afford it, whether able or 
not, or drop into the background both in his 
abilities and in the esteem of his fellows) with- 
out wearing himself thin with economy and actual 
deprivation in the intervals; he could meet with- 
out hardship the for him really great expense of 
annual attendance at the gatherings of his two 
or three learned societies, where his duty alike 
to himself and to his institution (indeed the 
wishes of his president were so plainly expressed 
as to amount almost to compulsion) called him 
to read, in the name of Scholarship, some reams 
of uninteresting manuscript on uninteresting sub- 
jects never heard of before to uninterested audi- 
ences who would never hear of them again, at 
least if their wishes were consulted ; he could meet 



The Professor Asks for More T13 

the demands of benevolent and religious organi- 
zations like his neighbors, without its costing him 
ten times as much in proportion to his salary as it 
did them; he could look forward to an old age 
not unseemly, when he should neither be an 
object of Carnegie charity nor suffer indignity 
or contempt at the hands of younger men who 
had forgotten his long and faithful service and 
not yet discovered that wisdom was not to die 
with them; he could indulge in a canoe, or a 
launch, or treat his wife to an occasional drive, 
or discard that rusty, creaking bicycle, out of 
date years ago, which had long made him a 
conspicuous mark for the shafts of the small boy's 

wit in a woodless and bearless generation 

But the Professor opened his eyes, and they 
rested upon the reality. He had hardly realized 
the extent of his poverty hitherto. Here was a 
sober estimate which placed a comfortable annual 
living expense, not riches, at fifteen thousand dol- 
lars — something like ten times the amount he was 
receiving! If fifteen thousand a year was not 



114 With the Professor 

riches, what was his own income to be denom- 
inated ? 

He analyzed the situation, and somewhat more 
fully than he had ever done before. He looked 
about in the community upon those who pos- 
sessed, if not the fifteen thousand, at least a 
great deal more than he himself received. Many 
of them were associates of himself and of his 
fellows in the faculty, and some of them were 
faculty men of independent means. He recog- 
nized, and without conceit, that he was possessed 
of as much culture as they, that his morals were 
as good as theirs, that they were not better 
churchmen than he, nor better citizens. He was 
their equal morally, socially, religiously, legally, 
and politically — and a charitable public sometimes 
went so far as to give him credit, in spite of his 
profession, for something like as much common 
sense as they possessed. They were his friends; 
he moved in the same social circle with them, and 
was welcome — dined with them, went to church 
with them, contributed toward the same benev- 



The Professor Asks for More 115 

olences, educated his children in the same way, 
shared in the same ideals, wore the same quality 
of clothing, was bound by the same conventions — 
in short, participated in their life. Why should 
he not do so, endowed as he was with all the 
gifts of personality enjoyed by them? 

But — the fact of which he could not dispose was 
that he was participating in a life whose pace was 
determined by them, not by him, and on the 
basis, not of the things they possessed in common 
with him, but on that of money, the one item in 
which he was unable to vie with them; and the 
pace was not accommodated to his financial cir- 
cumstances. He was their equal in all but in- 
come. That was the troublesome factor in the 
problem. That was the Atra Cur a which climbed 
up behind his classroom desk with him, and stood 
waiting at his bedside every morning when he 
woke. 

More than that: other people in the com- 
munity did not view the matter from his angle. 
There lay one root of his difficulty. The com- 



ii6 With the Professor 

munity in which the Professor lived did not judge 
him according to his salary, nor indeed did they 
take the trouble to inquire what it was; but 
ignorantly, though not unreasonably, classed him 
among the rich with whom he kept company. 
From the tailor and grocer down to the plumber 
and the ash man, all based the valuation of their 
services to him on the assumption that he was 
rich; the milliner and dressmaker served his wife 
on the same assumption; the Church looked to 
him for generous donations of time and money; 
he was solicited for a contribution to every benev- 
olent project which arose; the Improvement Asso- 
ciation levied upon him for funds to keep up 
public drives over which he had never driven; 
the lawyer charged him the same fees he did the 
merchant or banker whose income was five times 
his; the surgeon expected as much from him for 
the removal of his appendix as he did from the 
rich lawyer or broker or his rich neighbor of 
independent fortune; his sons associated with the 
sons of corporation magnates; his wife's intimate 



The Professor Asks for More 117 

friends in the Woman's Club were among the 
richest women in town, and she and her daughters 
looked to him to dress them like the daughters 
and wife of the banker. 

His whole salary went in the attempt to meet 
all these demands; his whole life was a more or 
less unsuccessful effort to appear worthy of the 
circle in which his family seemed intended by 
nature to move. This was why his library was 
as full of gaps as his purse was of cobwebs; this 
was why his clothes were so dangerously near 
being threadbare; this was why he had grown 
wrinkled and gray in the effort to piece out his 
salary by struggling with magazine articles during 
the midnight hours of term time, and through 
the vacation days which should have been given 
up to an attempt to regain something of the 
elasticity of mind lost during the year; this was 
why his digestion was impaired, and why some 
of the delight of teaching had left him, and 
something of the sunshine of his presence had 
begun to be missed by bis students, Clearly^ it 



ii8 With the Professor 

was an impossibility. Clearly, either the com- 
pany of his choice had set up a wrong ideal, 
or he had chosen the wrong company. 

The Professor cast about for remedies. Natu- 
rally, his first thought was that his own income 
ought to be greater. Why should the lawyer, 
the physician, the life insurance president, the 
broker, or the banker, whose professional prepara- 
tion had been no more protracted and no more 
expensive than his own, and whose services to 
the commonwealth were no more valuable, receive 
a reward so much greater than his own? In 
justice, either his reward should be greater, or 
theirs less; in either case he could live on terms 
of greater equality with them. 

But the Professor could see well enough that 
neither of these remedies would be wrought in 
time for his own salvation. His speculation took 
another direction. He remembered that his first 
year's service had brought him just eight hundred 
dollars, and that he had managed to make it 
support his household; that the second year he 



The Professor Asks for More 119 

had received a thousand, which had gone no 
farther than the eight hundred; and that of 
twelve, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen hundred, and 
two thousand no greater sum remained at the end 
of the year than had remained of the eight 
hundred; and that the expenses which took all 
his income now seemed to him as natural and 
necessary, and as little extravagant, as those of 
the first year. His needs had sprung into being 
as fast as his salary had risen to meet them. 
His increases of salary had contributed appre- 
ciably to the comfort of mind and body of the 
tradesmen with whom he had dealt, and had 
relieved his family (temporarily) of what seemed 
to them real need; but as for himself, he had 
become a stranger to peace of mind, and had 
almost as little peace of body. He had yielded 
to pressure, and allowed himself to be bound by 
new needs as they arose one by one, until he was 
hopelessly entangled in the meshes of an in- 
terminable net. 

H he could only have headed off the new needs 



I20 With the Professor 

from the beginning If he could only begin 

now Here might lie a remedy. Why not 

begin now ? He called to mind the golden words 
of Thomas Carlyle : The fraction of life increases 
in value not so much by increasing the numerator 
as by lessening the denominator. He had not 
properly kept his denominator down, he saw. He 
remembered the equally golden words of Steven- 
son : To be truly happy is a question of how we 
begin, and not of how we end, of what we want, 
and not of what we have. That he had allowed 
himself to want too much was now very clear to 
him. He remembered his Horace, too : 



Contracto melius parva cupidine 
Vectigalia porrigam, 
Quam si Mygdoniis regnum Alyattei 
Campis continuem. Multa petentibus 
Desunt multa; bene est cui deus obtulit 
Parca quod satis est manu. 



He remembered the reply of wise old Socrates, 
whose property was worth about one hundred 
dollars all told, to Kritoboulos, who had a hun- 
dredfold that amount: he himself, said the 



The Professor Asks for More 121 

homely philosopher, was the rich man of the 
two, for his possessions satisfied his wants, while 
Kritoboulos, whose income was only a third the 
sum needed to satisfy his, was the poor man. He 
also thought he saw in his mental storehouse a 
text or two from the Scriptures, though through 
a glass, somewhat darkly, for he had gradually 
dropped the old-fashioned habit of quoting, dis- 
couraged by the mystified look on the faces of 
his pupils and associates. He nevertheless re- 
called, by dint of effort, that the life was more 
than meat, and the body more than raiment, and 
that a man's life consisted not in the abundance 
of the things he possessed. 

After all, had he not been beguiled by false 
ideals? Had he been right in thinking it neces- 
sary to meet his richer friends on their own 
ground — to make his dinners as elaborate as 
theirs, to dress his family as they dressed theirs? 
Was it desirable after all that he have a launch 
or an automobile, or even a carriage, or that 
his wife have a cook, a nurse girl, and a chamber- 



122 With the Professor 

maid? Had not his idea as to what constituted 
kindness to his family been after all a trifle dis- 
torted? Was it after all desirable that his wife 
spend her time exclusively in social and intel- 
lectual pursuits? Would she be a whit happier 
with no housework to do and no children to care 
for? Was it necessary, or even desirable, for 
his sons and daughters to belong to fraternities 
and sororities ? Was it absolutely necessary that 
he live in a large house in the wealthy quarter 
of the city, and that his furniture, rugs, and 
china be as fine as those of his rich neighbors? 
Did those neighbors require it of him? Could he 
not retain their friendship and esteem by the 
dignified pursuit of an even course of life accord- 
ing to his own income? If not, why would it not 
be better to keep his own course nevertheless, and 
rely upon nature to form him his circle of friends 
from among those who did the same ? Why fol- 
low the many-headed beast of society at all ? Was 
there no geniality and no sociability for men of 
less than fifteen thousand dollars income? Was 



The Professor Asks for More 123 

there no friendly intercourse without elaborate 
dinners? Was there any law of nature, or any 
principle of common sense, which made it neces- 
sary for an educator of the youth of a democracy 
to have on hand three styles of hat, four styles 
of coat, two or three styles of shoe, and all the 
appurtenances thereto? Where was the ideal of 
plain living and high thinking ? Why not austere 
living and high thinking, if necessary? 

These thoughts the Professor, in communion 
with himself. He had been pursuing a false 
ideal, and had got into the wrong company. 
Clearly, he could not increase the numerator; 
ergo, he would lessen the denominator. He 
would amend his ways, and be happier; the simple 
life for him henceforth. All his good resolu- 
tions he made on the Ides, and on the Kalends 
began to break them. He could not free him- 
self from the meshes — and his struggles, to tell 
the truth, were not very violent. The incomes 
of his associates would have to come down, he 
saw, or his own would have to come up, or 



124 With the Professor 

society be made over, before he should be relieved 
of his burden, or cease to be haunted by the 
vision of old age and the Associated Charities. 

Meanwhile, he would find his consolation in 
the nobility of his calling and in the delight of 
pursuing it. 



CHAPTER V 
A DESPERATE SITUATION 

The Professor stood leaning on his rake, 
his sleeves rolled up, and his flushed face beady 
with perspiration. Not really, of course; only 
figuratively. He was not in his garden, and it 
was not a garden-rake. It was a Muck-rake, 
and the Professor had been laboring for some 
time to no purpose, and was now resting, and 
meditating. 

The Professor had been obliged to buy a new 
overcoat that year. His last was five years old. 
Not that age in itself mattered: he was a pro- 
fessor of the classics, and age improved things, 
according to his thinking; and besides, he had 
grown so fond of the old coat through long 
association that to lay it aside seemed almost 

like casting off a tried and faithful friend. 
125 



126 With the Professor 

But the sleeve-ends and the edges had worn 
through, and worse, the button-holes had gapingly 
refused to serve another day : you can't wear an 
overcoat forever. Then, too, there had been 
needy Professor Junior, on whom the mantle 
would descend, and Professor Junior's expectant 
younger brother, who was next in the line of suc- 
cession, and would in his turn enter into an in- 
heritance because of his elder's good fortune; so 
that when the Professor had considered how well 
he would be serving the economic principle of the 
greatest good to the greatest number, his act had 
seemed to him to be founded upon real virtue. 

So he had made a judicious purchase, skilfully 
selecting a garment of non-committal color and 
style — one of the kind which never looks very 
new, and, except at very short range, never looks 
very old, and which, in the light of several times 
repeated experience, the Professor saw would 
possess the prime quality of longeval ambiguity 
after its evil days came. 

Of course he hadn't paid for it yet. It was 



A Desperate Situation 127 

still the early part of the year, before the Christ- 
mas holidays, and he had hardly as yet made up 
the annual deficit caused by the summer vacation 
— that delightfully long period during which he 
was expected to be getting his next year's courses 
into shape, and writing books for the glory of 
his college, and during which his expenses went 
on as usual, and his most substantial earnings 
were the envy of his neighbors for having chosen 
such an irresponsible and carefree calling. He 
had never at any time succeeded in meeting all 
his financial obligations before Christmas, and 
latterly it had been midwinter before he could 
begin to look the world in the face again. 

For times had been changing. The butcher, 
the baker, and the grocer, the coalman, the milk- 
man, and the dry goods merchant had all entered 
into league against him, and charged him more 
each year; his books were all higher priced now, 
and net at that; his landlord asked more and 
gave less; and two or three examples of the 
eternal and insatiable feminine were fast grow- 



128 With the Professor 

ing up in his household — but the Professor's sal- 
ary remained the same. He belonged to no union, 
but had to stand and deliver to those who did; 
he received no tips, but was obliged to give them 
in order to enter into full possession of what 
his money bought. In the midst of a world which 
was united and stood, he was divided and faUing. 

His friend, the professor of economics, had 
often explained to the Professor that all this 
was wholly natural and inevitable, being only 
the outgrowth of certain economic laws which 
were perfectly susceptible of demonstration, and 
that the remedy would in process of time be 
evolved through the same instrumentality. The 
Professor himself, who was not much of a 
reasoner, suggested that a rise in salaries would, 
on the whole, be simpler and more gratifying; 
but he accepted his friend's explanation never- 
theless. 

It was comforting to feel that he understood 
his case, however imperfectly; but there was the 
coat to pay for, just the same. He had cast 



A Desperate Situation 129 

about for ways and means. Couldn't he in some 
way turn his professional knowledge to account? 
His friend the geologist, he had been told, was 
getting rich by engaging in work outside the class- 
room, and divers other faculty acquaintances 
were doing the same. Some of his friends, too, 
were writing valuable books on the destruction 
of disease germs, the handling of currency, the 
rearing of children, the art of cooking, and a 
variety of other interesting subjects, and adding 
to both their reputations and their bank accounts. 

But the Professor had immediately reflected 
that he could locate no mines or quarries except 
those of literary and spiritual richness, and no 
one cared to pay for that kind of prospecting. 
He knew that he could survey no lines except the 
long and devious paths to culture, and that few 
people in his day concerned themselves with that 
kind of surveying. 

Not that they didn't care for culture; they 
did care for it, for they invested in all kinds of 
cheap imitations of it and substitutes for it. 



130 With the Professor 

They couldn't afford the real thing, because it cost 
them time and effort; and there were other 
more important prizes. There was success, and 
wealth. What they wanted was an air line to 
wealth — through cultured landscapes, with the 
briefest possible stop-overs at a few proper points 
just for the purpose of locating the principal 
monuments mentioned in the guidebook, and get- 
ting the innkeepers' tags pasted onto their travel- 
ing bags. The tags often came handy as proofs 
that they had really been there. 

To be sure, the Professor had at times handled 
a little currency — for short periods, you under- 
stand; and -he thought he knew something about 
the way in which a child should be trained up; 
and he could cook certain innocent dishes — the 
kind he and his brothers and their ancestors had 
thrived on in days before it had become the 
province of colleges and family journals to en- 
lighten and frighten the world on the subject 
of what it ate. But he wasn't familiar enough 
with the terminology of any of those branches 



A Desperate Situation 131 

of learning to be able to dress up his remarks 
in the pompous and circumstantial style without 
which he knew they would command neither re- 
spect nor attention. 

He would have to try something in his own 
field, after all. Not in his specialty, you under- 
stand: he had done many an article on literary 
subjects, waited a year for learned journals to 
find space for them, and looked for his reward 
to the cultivation they afforded him, the interest 
with which they filled his calling, and the satis- 
faction of having done a scholarly piece of work. 
On the last one he had spent most of his sum- 
mer vacation, and then had been obliged to pay 
for a few reprints of it. 

However, he didn't feel like complaining. In- 
deed, there were moments when he felt not only 
that he got all that his articles were worth to 
the world, but that it would be greatly to the 
comfort, if indeed not to the interest, of society 
at large if all such publications had to be paid 
for, by their authors, at advertising rates. Such 



132 With the Professor 

an arrangement would at least possess the merit 
of fostering frankness. 

But all this was beside the point. What the 
Professor wanted was money with which to pay 
for his overcoat. He must write something 
which would be worth while to the literary peri- 
odicals rather than to the journals of the learned 
— something of interest to the general reader — 
something new, or at least something old dressed 
up in a new garb. 

It must be popular, of course; that Is, it must 
follow and reflect the sentiment of the people, 
while it appeared to lead and direct it. A bright 
idea struck him. He would expose something 
or somebody. He had been reading exposes in 
various magazines for some time, could see that 
they were popular, and had it from report that 
the authors received fabulous amounts for their 
services. The more he had thought of it, the 
better had the idea seemed. While Raking was 
the fashion and the smell of muck was abroad 
in the land, why shouldn't he have his turn at it ? 



A Desperate Situation 133 

Hence the Professor's appearance in the realms 
of muck. He had got him a fine-toothed Rake, 
determined to succeed. . . . But whom could 
he expose? He wasn't acquainted with anyone 
who was apparently very bad, or really very rich 
or great, and he knew that if he attacked anyone 
at all it must be someone with both qualifications. 
As a matter of fact, there was only one indi- 
vidual concerning whom he possessed informa- 
tion adequate to form the basis of such an article 
as he wished to write — and that individual was 
himself. But it was hardly possible to expose 
himself — unless he could conceal his authorship 
under a feigned name. He considered it, hoping 
that the plan might prove feasible. 

But it was open to grave objection: he wasn't 
great; he wasn't famous, so far as he was aware, 
and he was very sure he wasn't rich; and it 
wouldn't be quite fair to the public to get it 
wrought up for nothing. 

So he had reluctantly given up that idea. His 
next was more happy. He would expose his own 



134 With the Professor 

profession. He knew something about that, too, 
and he felt sure the pubhc would believe all he 
said. He knew that there were certain dark 
rumors abroad about college professors, and that 
the public thought it about time they were in- 
vestigated. 

The more the Professor had thought of it, 
the more he had recognized in the subject the 
elements of popularity. The public would not 
only believe, but take pleasure in believing. For 
most people were busy and practical, and the 
college professor was looked upon as an im- 
practical idler; busy people w^ould therefore read 
and enjoy. Then again, most people were poor,, 
and looked upon the college professor as rich; 
poor people would therefore regard his downfall 
with pleasure. Between the two, the public 
would be enthusiastic in its appreciation. No 
magazine editor could fail to recognize the fact. 
The overcoat was as good as paid for. The 
Professor had drawn up his chair, taken out his 
pen — or rather, he had rolled up his sleeves. 



A Desperate Situation 135 

seized the Rake, and set to. Hence his perspira- 
tion and fatigue when we first caught sight of 
him. 

But it was not merely fatigue which had given 
the Professor pause. The thought of his con- 
freres had suddenly struck him. They were a 
part of the public, too. It seemed a mean thing 
to do — thus to take advantage of a class of men 
who, even if they were useless, had at least never 
done serious harm. But the Professor brushed 
the objection aside; he knew that no college 
professor had ever been known to take another 
college professor seriously, and he knew he would 
be forgiven, even if his motive in writing were 
not instantly understood, as he had no doubt 
it would be. So he went on with his Raking. 

Of course, the first thing he turned up was 
Graft — Graft that rode on the posting winds, and 
did belie all corners of the world. He knew it 
would be when he began; or at least he knew 
that he could afYord to stop for nothing else until 
he had turned it up. All exposes had to be based 



136 With the Professor 

on graft if they were to be readable. The right- 
eous hated to see the wicked prosper, and were 
ahvays dehghted to see him brought low. Didn't 
the Professor himself know of colleagues of his 
who wrote textbooks, and got a royalty of at 
least twenty-five or thirty dollars a year for sev- 
eral years ? and didn't they recommend their own 
textbooks to their students, and sometimes even 
prescribe their use? Didn't he know of others 
who wrote popular articles for magazines, and 
added sometimes as much as fifty or seventy-five 
dollars to their year's salary? Weren't there 
scientists on the faculty who turned their skill 
to account by service outside the college? Hadn't 
he himself once earned ten dollars by tutoring 
during the college year ? Didn't some professors 
marry fortunes? and didn't they sometimes make 
money by real estate transactions? Most toler- 
able and not to be endured ! saith Dogberry. 

To be sure, the Professor himself knew that 
all these activities (including the marrying) were 
so many contributions toward the equipment of 



A Desperate Situation 137 

the efficient teacher, and that those who did not 
engage in them (again including the marrying) 
rarely proved in the end either agreeable or 
desirable members of a faculty. He knew, too, 
that the time consumed in these achievements was 
taken from what was left after a reasonably long 
daily service during regular term work, and that 
whole vacations were gladly sacrificed to them. 

But the public wouldn't think of that. And 
besides, there ought to be nothing earthy about 
the profession of teaching: college professors 
ought to be every bit as much above suspicion 
as Caesar's wife herself. Surely it was sordid 
and unseemly for them to be concerned about 
their salaries, or to complain about the time re- 
quired by their duties, or to put their knowledge 
to any use whatsoever outside the college walls, 
or profit by any sort of commercial transaction. 
They ought not only not to follow that which was 
evil, but also to abstain from all appearance of 
evil. 

Even in the matter of marrying, how were 



138 With the Professor 

students to know that it was affection and not 
money which lay at the root of certain cases of 
professorial matrimony? To the unmarried and 
widows, therefore, it ought to be said that it were 
better for them to remain even as they were 
than to give even the slightest ground for mis- 
understanding. And as for real estate, if the 
truth could be known, doubtless many a ruined 
gambler in stocks could trace the beginning of 
his downward career to the successful real estate 
transaction of one of his college professors. 
Of course, no one had ever heard of a professor's 
making very much: but it was not the amount 
concerned; it was the principle involved. 

As to the time spent by college professors in 
the discharge of their duties, the Professor recog- 
nized that there again he had a good match. 
Didn't everyone know that college professors 
taught only twelve or fifteen hours a week — an 
average of three hours per day for five days 
in the week, and for only forty weeks in the year 
at that? And besides, what work he did was 



A Desperate Situation 139 

not real work: he never strained his muscles, 
never soiled his hands, and enjoyed himself all 
the time — and everyone knew that work of that 
kind was not work at all, but recreation. Nine 
to twelve in the forenoon — and the rest of the day 
for skating, golf, tennis, rowing, the theater, and 
parties — 

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, 
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread— 

and then Saturdays and vacations, too — Oh, the 
professor's hfe were Paradise enow! 

The Professor leaned on the Rake again, and 
laughed aloud at the droll picture of himself 
which he knew existed in the popular imagination. 
And then he thought of his full life — the fore- 
noons taken up by recitations, conferences, and 
lectures, with their nervous wear and tear; the 
afternoons filled with preparation for the lec- 
tures of the next day, and with committee meet- 
ings; the evenings replete with the same activities; 
the special sessions of the faculty where for 



140 With the Professor 

hours he had to Hsten to his earnest brethren as 
they discussed the athletic situation; the Satur- 
da3^s and vacations when he raced with Time in 
the effort to accompHsh the tasks for which, by 
dint of tyranny over himself through the week 
and the term, he had reserved those periods; the 
rare occasions when he spent an evening at the 
theater, or even with his family, or anywhere 
except in his study or at some learned club meet- 
ing where, under the name of diversion, he and 
his fellows met to hear each other read fascinat- 
ing stories about " The nature and origin of 
binucleated cells in some basidiomycetes," or 
" The development of the primary uredospore," 
or " Bucolic diaeresis," or " Medea's marriage 
problem"; the permeation of his mealtimes, his 
recreation, his very sleep, by his all-absorbing 
work. Home, the usual refuge of the business 
or professional man, afforded him no protection 
against the cares of his calling — for his home 
was office, laboratory, and consulting-room to 
him. The social law of the community — not to 



A Desperate Situation 141 

talk Shop — afforded him some little surcease, or 
would have done, had it been impartially ad- 
ministered; but even then it could not do away 
with thinking shop. 

For men who worked with their muscles, the 
day's labor was over when the whistle blew. 
Office workers, and clerks in general, had certain 
hours beyond which their obligation to their 
employers did not extend. But a professor was 
supposed to sit up all night to get his examination 
papers corrected on time, or to insure his class a 
lecture according to schedule, and was expected 
to be accessible at all times of the day, and all 
days in the week. He was clearly to be classed 
with mothers, farmers, and others whose work 
was never done. 

Of course, he enjoyed his work, and when he 
saw others looking upon their tasks as drudgery, 
he often felt guilty at the thought of the satis- 
faction life afforded him, and almost wished his 
own calhng were less pleasant. Being a professor 
of ancient languages, he was so far medieval as 



142 With the Professor 

to consider the advisability of scourging himself 
to quiet his conscience. He was even ashamed 
of not regarding his lot as poverty. In the end, 
however, he couldn't see why he was to be blamed 
simply because he was happy and contented; so 
he gave up the idea of the scourge. 

On the whole, the Professor came to the con- 
clusion that it would hardly be fitting to attack 
the college professor either on the ground of 
graft or because he couldn't render a satisfactory 
account of his time. His scholarly conscience 
insisted that there be something more than mere 
semblance of truth underlying his attack. 

But that was not a real obstacle, after all; 
there were plenty of other grounds for exposing 
him which were juster and more substantial. 
He would attack him for encouraging aristo- 
cratic ideals. Popular report had it, he knew, 
that college professors were not democratic. 
Didn't they wear good clothes all the time, asso- 
ciate with rich people, cultivate a taste for art and 
literature, avoid common saloons and musical 



A Desperate Situation 143 

comedies (the Professor was not quite sure of this 
last), and in general separate themselves from the 
crowd and assume the I-am-holier-than-thou atti- 
tude? Didn't many of them belong to exclusive 
secret societies, and didn't the faculty in his 
own institution tolerate fraternities and sorori- 
ties, and even encourage them? Hadn't one of 
his colleagues expressed himself to the effect 
that " if democracy meant muckerdom, it would 
be better to get on without it " ? Here was a 
fine state of affairs, indeed! And in a state 
institution, too! 

But the Professor's inner self objected — ^that 
conscience of his that was always getting in the 
way of his schemes for making money. He knew 
that good clothes and cultivated tastes and decent 
social ties did not of necessity mean aristocracy, 
any more than democracy meant muckerdom. 

And besides, he wasn't telling the truth. The 
college professor didn't separate himself from 
the crowd. He might not attend fourth-class 
plays and patronize saloons, but he sometimes 



144 With the Professor 

went to the Palmengarten or the Rathskeller, he 
ran for alderman and got onto committees which 
had to do with the sprinkling of the streets and 
the disposal of garbage; and when you met him 
on the street away from home you couldn't dis- 
tinguish him from a doctor, or a traveling man, 
or a merchant, either by his language or his 
manner; and as for his dress, there were good 
reasons why that should not be better than the 
ordinary. 

The Professor had to concede to his conscience 
that the aristocratic college professor was almost 
a myth. In his own institution he was sure that 
democracy had all her due. There it was im- 
possible for a stranger to distinguish between 
students and professors, except when the latter 
were greybearded or exceptionally bald. In the 
case of the younger professors there were almost 
no marks of identification — certainly none that 
depended on dignity, or on arbitrary claims for 
respect. The professors had come down, so to 
speak, and the students had come up — or perhaps 



A Desperate Situation 145 

the students, through frequent expression of 
democratic sentiment in the press, had intimidated 
the professors. At any rate, when you saw a 
nice-looking young man enjoying a cigarette on 
the campus, or flirting with a co-ed at a football 
game, you couldn't be absolutely certain that it 
wasn't a young and precocious member of the 
faculty. 

The Professor had grown fairly accustomed 
and almost reconciled to even the extreme mani- 
festations of college democracy. It no longer 
disturbed him when a student who had come into 
his office for an interview perched himself naively 
and nonchalantly upon the table, chewing gum 
and swinging his legs, as he surveyed and made 
suggestions on the Professor's surroundings. He 
had long since ceased to regard his own advice 
as worth anything to speak of, or his own position 
or person as calling for any special manifestation 
of respect. He was even prepared to be called 
by his Christian name, or his nickname — which, 
after all, was preferable to the " Say ! " with 



146 With the Professor 

which co-educational students invariably ad- 
dressed him. He had again and again helped 
vote the privilege of an audience before the 
faculty to students who had been dismissed for 
drunkenness, or cheating, or other democratic 
acts subversive of college discipline. He had 
again and again seen the entrance requirements 
made more simple, and the requirements for grad- 
uation cheapened, and was sure that any aristo- 
cratic inclination of the faculty to think that, 
by reason of years and experience, they were com- 
petent to direct students in the selection of studies 
had been thoroughly displaced by the democratic 
way of allowing every individual to judge for 
himself. One subject was as good as another, 
and one man was as good as another — and a 
grate dale betther, bedad, as Thackeray's Irish 
philosopher said. 

The Professor's great doubt now was getting 
to be as to whether he might not better resign 
and go to school to the younger generation. He 
himself had arrived at something like an intelli- 



A Desperate Situation 147 

gent understanding of education and its purposes 
by the time he had been out of college ten years; 
but it was different now. The last number of 
the Graduate Magazine had contained an editorial 
addressed to the faculty, president, regents, legis- 
lature, and people of the state, nation, and world 
in general, written by a young man of twenty- 
two, one year out of college, and settling the 
whole educational question in all its phases 
at one stroke. The general tenor of the article 
had been to the effect that faculties didn't see 
things in their true light, and were in the way of 
progress; and the Professor didn't know but its 
author was right. 

So he couldn't expose his colleagues for lack 
of democracy. If to care nothing for incense, 
and to have no particular convictions as to their 
own value, were democracy, then were they the 
most democratic souls alive. Here was another 
line of attack closed to him. Was it possible that 
he would suffer from dearth of material, after 
all his confidence? 



148 With the Professor 

He wondered whether he couldn't make capital 
out of the once well known impractical ways of 
the college professor. The idea wouldn't bear 
the test, however; the Professor saw that very 
soon. What was the use of trying to convince 
people of the unbusinesslike, unmethodical, and 
impractical character of a man who supported 
a household of six or eight members on fifteen 
hundred a year, clothing and educating them 
so that they moved in the same circles of society 
with the sons and daughters of those whose in- 
comes were tenfold that amount? No, the col- 
lege professor was neither unbusinesslike nor 
behind the times; his laboratory was full of the 
best and most approved appliances, and his de- 
partment of the library displayed all the latest 
publications ; he employed the stereopticon in his 
classroom; in a hundred ways he used the money 
of the state or trustees, and showed as much 
ingenuity in being expensive as the most 
facile of their servants in any other field of 
activity. 



A Desperate Situation 149 

And college professors were vital in their work, 
too — no one was more so. Hadn't one of the 
Professor's colleagues given the world a milk- 
test? Hadn't another discovered a good way 
to thaw out frozen pipes in the dead of winter? 
Wasn't another just about to give humanity a 
new form of soda biscuit? Why multiply in- 
stances? Were there not college professors now 
for the teaching of every practical thing under 
the sun — from the care and feeding of babies 
to the construction of a steam engine? In the 
Professor's childhood, if a boy didn't know beans 
from peas, people wondered what kind of parents 
he had; but now, if he made a similar mistake, 
or conceived that beefsteak grew on trees or was 
dug out of the ground, his ignorance was made 
the basis of a charge against the schools. The 
educational system felt such reproof keenly, and 
was sensitively (no, not a misprint for sensibly) 
doing its best to evolve a remedy. 

Of course, it goes without saying that the 
Professor was too modest to claim any such 



150 With the Professor 

glory for himself and his colleagues in the aca- 
demic department. Their aims were not practical. 
All they were doing was to send out into the 
society of the state cultivated ladies and gentle- 
men, and everyone knew that nothing could be 
more impractical or have less to do with life. 
But then, they were not representative, and so 
that fact had no bearing on the Professor's 
present attempt. When people spoke of college 
professors now, they meant men and women who 
made things and did things. 

It was discouraging. The Professor was by 
this time thoroughly alarmed at his repeated 
failures to get his brethren on the hip. It began 
to look dark for his tailor — or rather, for the 
ready-made-clothing man. 

But there remained the college professor's rep- 
utation for general instability of character: he 
might assail that, and he felt sure that his efforts 
would be applauded. He would expose the col- 
lege professor's flippancy, insincerity, and general 
lack of seriousness. He had once received a 



A Desperate Situation 151 

visit from a relatiVe who belonged to the general 
public and reflected its views, and he still re- 
membered the indignant outburst with which, 
after a walk through the streets and about the 
campus, the said relative had given vent to his 
conclusions : " Why can t the fools dress, talk, 
and act like sensible people ! " 

This was the result of his observation of stu- 
dents, of course; but from whom did students 
copy all the vices and none of the virtues, if 
not from their professors? Afterward, at din- 
ner with a dozen of the Professor's friends, his 
relative's experience had been no less unsatis- 
factory : he had sat in mystified and angry silence, 
unable to take the least part in the medley of wit, 
satire, sarcasm, iconoclasm, badinage, and pic- 
turesque circumlocution which formed the con- 
versation. It would not have been an exaggera- 
tion to say that not a serious word was uttered 
during the whole hour. The Professor's friend 
was horrified. To think that the education of the 
youth of the land was in the hands of such men! 



1^2 With the Professor 

He left town with the firm conviction that college 
life was a menace to the nation. 

Yes, college professors were altogether too 
trivial, and deserved to be exposed without mercy. 
They joked about things sacred and things pro- 
fane, about life and about death, about their own 
subjects of instruction. They forbade serious 
conversation at table and on social occasions, 
jested in their lectures, and giggled in their chapel 
discourses. Nothing escaped the shafts of their 
wit. They had been known to jest about their 
very salaries. 

And this wasn't the worst. The Professor 
surmised that many of them looked upon educa- 
tion itself as a huge joke. At least they had 
something less than perfect faith in each other; 
else why did they invariably send their sons and 
daughters elsewhere to college ? He was inclined 
to regard as a subterfuge the statement that they 
wished to secure for them the benefits of college 
life away from home. He had read somewhere 
that, as early as the elder Scipio's time, it had 



A Desperate Situation 153 

been regarded as quite a witticism to express 
surprise that two priests could refrain from laugh- 
ing when they met each other on the street, and 
he thought that the same time-honored joke might 
well be applied to college professors. 

The Professor reflected, however, that not all 
of his confreres possessed the same sense of 
humor. No — and he thought of it with a kind 
of dread — there were those of the other variety, 
who ponderously plowed through life in solemn 
seriousness, took everything literally, and never 
showed their teeth by way of smile, though Nes- 
tor swore the jest were laughable. And strange 
to say, it was not in the midst of lighter surround- 
ings that they showed most clearly their de- 
ficiency. It was while they were at the serious 
business of life that they made it apparent, in 
a thousand ways, that humor was a sealed book 
to them — in their exaggerated ideas of the im- 
portance of their specialties, in their insistence 
upon the necessity of certain subjects for success 
in this or that career; in their conscientious and 



154 With the Professor 

laborious presentation of irrelevant and imma- 
terial data before young people who knew better 
than their instructors that stuff like that wasn't 
what made courses valuable; in their assumption 
that these same young people saw things as they 
did, or indeed got any very great benefit from any 
course; in their unquestioning faith in details in 
general; in the earnestness with which they de- 
bated the unessential in faculty meeting; in their 
long and unsmiling conferences with equally un- 
smiling students who were seriously attempting 
to map out work for the whole four years at 
one sitting; in their writing and reading of learned 
papers (and especially the reading, for there 
was where the matter affected the Professor) ; 
in a word, in their sublime unconsciousness of 
the part they were playing in the Comedie Hu- 
maine. 

The Professor knew well enough that his 
friend in the department of ^^ducation believed 
that he was contributing momentously to the solu- 
tion of the educational questions of the age — 



A Desperate Situation 155 

but the Professor himself was convinced that the 
same things had been said annually, or oftener, 
since the foundation of the republic. Only the 
day before, in an old file of a New England 
newspaper, he had read that " the amount of non- 
sense uttered regarding the subject of education 
during the past twenty-five years was greater 
than that uttered on all other subjects put to- 
gether." The file was dated 1825, and the Pro- 
fessor was moved to smiles at the thought of the 
immense proportions which the sum-total must 
have assumed by this time. 

And here were educators still discussing, still 
changing methods, and still thinking that they 
were doing and thinking new things, while for 
the most part they were merely pouring old wine 
into new bottles. Change was succeeding change 
so rapidly that the Professor could no longer 
keep track of his children's progress at school, 
and had almost been intimidated into giving up 
all attempt to contribute to their education him- 
self. Sometimes, indeed, he suspected that they 



156 With the Professor 

were not really being educated. The whole mat- 
ter recalled to his mind Lowell's 

Change jes* for change, is like them big hotels 
Where they shift plates, an' let ye live on smells. 

And then, there was his classical friend. The 
Professor knew that he really believed that his 
forthcoming publication on the number of efs 
in Tacitus as compared with the number of xais 
in Thucydides was going to be widely read and 
far-reaching in its consequences, while the Pro- 
fessor himself knew well enough that it, together 
with ten thousand other articles of like nature 
which were being corrupted by moth and rust 
on the library shelves of the country (he regretted 
that thieves could not get at them, too), was only 
a contribution to the world's unread and unread- 
able literature of humor. It made the Professor 
think of the Gnat on the Bull's horn, who asked 
the big beast whether he wasn't sorry to have 
him go away, and who felt hurt when his bovine 
friend replied that he hadn't known he was there. 



A Desperate Situation 157 

The Professor saw that this was about the case 
with his friend's pubHcation, but that his friend 
never suspected it in the least. Divers scientific 
friends were cast in the same solemn mold. One 
of them was dyspeptic, and always carried graham 
bread in his pocket when he went out to dine; 
and on one occasion, at an afternoon function, 
when his hostess asked him if he'd take the 
regulation cup of tea, he had said no, thank you, 
he preferred a little hot milk. Another friend, in 
the Romance department, had been overheard 
giving instructions to a blue-eyed freshman girl 
about a topic which she was to write : " Now, you 
go to the library, procure admission to the de- 
partmental stacks, and consult Breal's Melanges 
on the subject of Semasiology." She had van- 
ished, with an air of stupefaction which was not 
feigned ; but soon appeared in the doorway again, 
and timidly, with many blushes, said : " Say, how 
duh yuh spell ut ? " The gentleman informed her, 
with all the gravity which should belong to a good 
semasiologist. 



158 With the Professor 

So that if some professors seemed too flippant, 
it was equally apparent that there were others 
who were too serious for genuine usefulness. 
The Professor saw that they couldn't all be 
reduced to one type and attacked as a unit, after 
all. It might indeed be that both extremes needed 
to be exposed; but supposing that the evil (as is, 
of course, usual with exposed evils) were cor- 
rected as a result, what was to become of educa- 
tion? Perfectly well balanced and practical men 
who knew how to set just values on their services 
and upon the rewards of life did not become 
college professors; or, if they did, remained such 
only a short time. It wouldn't do to wreck the 
colleges and universities of the land. 

The event was that the Professor was forced 
to give up his plan of exposing college professors. 
He could discover only one fault in them — a 
slight tendency to uncertainty of balance — and 
he remembered often having heard that this was 
a quality inseparable from genius itself. The 
college professor was clean, honest, decent, mod- 



A Desperate Situation 159 

ern, practical, vital, and democratic — a proper 
man as one should see in a summer's day; a 
most lovely, gentleman-like man. Therefore 
he must needs be let alone. 

So the Professor picked up the Rake and 
started for the tool-shed to hang it up. He was 
melancholy because of his failure, and moved 
slowly; and when he was halfway, he came to 
a standstill, in a brown study. Yes, the college 
professor was all very proper, and stood the test; 
that was very apparent. . . . But wasn't that 
just what was the matter with him? The Pro- 
fessor couldn't reconcile himself to the conclusion 
that there wasn't something wrong with him. 
His intuition told him there was. Here was a 
new train of thought. He would pursue it. . . . 
And then, there was the coat. He shouldered the 
Rake again, and retraced his steps. 

Yes, he had found the joint in their armor, 
after all: they were altogether too free from 
objection. They were too modern, and too much 
like other people. Where was the bald-headed. 



i6o With the Professor 

spectacled, absent-minded old gentleman who had 
afforded mankind so much amusement for genera- 
tions? What was to become of the world with- 
out the college professor to laugh at? Had the 
ancient professor who couldn't recognize his 
own children out of their proper surroundings 
become a myth? or the one who tied a string 
around his finger to insure Mrs. Professor against 
his tricky memory, and then consumed himself 
in vain attempts to recall the reason for the 
string? or the one who shoveled potatoes into 
a bottomless basket, lifted it up, carried it away, 
poured out its emptiness, and returned to repeat 
the operation, without once waking up to reality ? 
or the one who went upstairs to get a book, forgot 
on the way, and had to go back to his exact 
original position in order to get straight again? 
Was the world left to the comic stage and the 
comic papers alone for its laughter? 

The Professor feared it was. He looked about 
him, and saw only a few of the old type left — 
and they would soon be gone. In their places 



A Desperate Situation i6i 

were growing up, had grown up, In fact, a new 
generation — young men of infallible memory and 
irreproachable method, with vital subjects and 
practical aims, vigorous, aggressive, unsenti- 
mental — and not in the least old-fashioned. 

Not old-fashioned. The Professor thought of 
the old fashion. He remembered the old fashion 
very well. Years back he had been in college 
under men of the old fashion, and his heart 
reached out to them at the recollection. That 
had been in the day when there was a small 
faculty and few students, before the college had 
become a vast machine with professors at the 
lever; when professors not only instructed but 
loved their students, and when students not only 
submitted to, but reverenced, their professors; 
before it had become the fashion to go to college 
for social prestige, and when it could safely be 
assumed that a man's presence there signified 
ambition of the highest type; before students 
avoided being seen with their professors for fear 
of the charge of bootlicking; before humor be- 



1 62 With the Professor 

came an end instead of a mean; before the abso- 
lute reign of the specialist, the rise of the grad- 
uate school, and the mania for publication. 

The Professor had, indeed, taken some of his 
courses under specialists, but those were not the 
teachers he remembered. Those who had won 
a place in his memory, and in his affection, were 
of the old-fashioned type — ^professors of the clas- 
sics, who perhaps knew very little about the 
sources of Dictys Cretensis, but who were so 
magnetically full of Homer, and Virgil, and 
Horace, and Sophocles, and who were such fine 
specimens of nobility of character, that a course 
under them was full of an intellectual and moral 
inspiration whose warmth never entirely spent 
itself. They knew their English literature, too, 
and could teach it. Perhaps they were innocent 
of appreciating the importance of the influence 
of the Theban Cycle on Celtic legend, but they 
were so filled with the spirit of Milton and 
Shakespeare that their classroom Instruction in 
Greek and Latin did almost as much for the stu- 



A Desperate Situation 163 

dent's knowledge of English literature as for his 
familiarity with the classics: you could hear a 
pin drop when they began to quote the passages 
they loved. 

They could have taught mathematics, too, if 
necessary, or history — or possibly a science or 
two. Of course they didn't know all that vast 
array of obscure and for the most part insig- 
nificant and unessential facts — 

As thick and numberless 
As the gay motes that people the sunbeams— 

which form the penumbra of knowledge about 
a subject, and the possession of which seemed to 
the Professor to be the most marked distinction 
between the specialist and the old type of scholar ; 
but they knew the nucleus, and it never occurred 
to their students to doubt for a single moment 
their infallibiHty. The Professor remembered a 
course of mathematics which he had taken under 
a man whose real field was literature — a sov- 
ereign Alchemist that in a trice transmuted the 



164 With the Professor 

leaden metal of sines and cosines into Gold. They 
were men rich in wisdom and culture, as well 
as masters of mere facts. 

Nor were they lacking in sound scholarship, 
in spite of their breadth of interest. They even 
published — not in their early youth : that was the 
great difference between them and the genera- 
tion of specialists — but after their powers had 
ripened, and in the fulness of time, when they 
had something to say which was well matured 
and worth while. 

They were men with peculiarities of manner, 
of course. One always laid his forefinger along- 
side his nose and cocked one eye while emphasiz- 
ing some favorite precept. Another pawed the 
air as he spoke. Another groaned between 
phrases, and even words. Another had a way 
of tilting his head back and half closing his fine 
old eyes as he repeated favorite passages — 

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; 
Four nights will quickly dream away the time; 
And then the moon, like to a silver bow 
New-bent in heaven — 



A Desperate Situation 165 

The Professor felt it all again. The results of 
the inspiration that had lifted his soul as he lis- 
tened to old Uncle Johnny were among his dearest 
possessions in life. 

Many was the laugh, too, which they inspired, 
and many the jokes about them which were cur- 
rent, became traditional, and served for the de- 
light of succeeding generations of students. 
Many were the tricks — disrespectful only in 
seeming — which were played upon them, 
and which were appreciated, too; for they were 
men of real humor — not the kind which flared 
up noisily like the crackling of thorns, but 
the genial and gentle sort, like afternoon sun- 
shine in the season of mists and mellow 
fruitfulness. 

They had not only their peculiarities of man- 
ner, but most of them had their pet phrases, or 
their pet details of instruction. It paid you to 
know all about quamquam when it came to ex- 
amination under the professor of Latin — Old 
Quamquam they had called him, and when his 



1 66 With the Professor 

sixth son first saw the Hght he was promptly 
distinguished as Little Quidquid. The Greek pro- 
fessor was Old Zeus, and the professor of Astron- 
omy was always referred to as Twinkle. You 
could judge the degree of affection felt for a 
professor by the aptness of his nickname and 
the frequency of its employment. 

And they were men of broad outlook and re- 
liable judgment, even if they didn't stray far 
from their own vine and fig-tree. In those days 
you could plan your course without running for 
consultation to ten different men representing ten 
different subjects — or, perhaps, only ten different 
phases of the same subject — and then withdraw- 
ing to your room, notes and schedules in hand, 
to become distracted in the attempt to get a point 
of view by reconciling or balancing the opposing 
forces; your white-haired old professor, who had 
never heard of a system of " advisers/' would 
set you right out of the abundant depths and 
breadths of his experience, and you would accept 
his solution with gratitude and implicit con- 



A Desperate Situation 167 

fidence. You hadn't learned yet that young 
America was wiser than all the graybeards in 
Israel. 

They were men of soul and conscience, too. 
They may have been somewhat apart from the 
world — but then, they were not aware that college 
professors ought not to contribute to a moral 
aristocracy, and didn't realize as they should 
have done that it wasn't exactly the kind and 
neighborly thing to be better than your fellows. 
They ignorantly supposed that it devolved upon 
them to hold up before their youthful student 
community examples of moral as well as intel- 
lectual excellence, and so did not hesitate on occa- 
sion to wander beyond the limits of their sub- 
jects to emphasize the moral bearing of certain 
intellectual truths which lay along the way. They 
seemed to feel the burden of responsibility, too, as 
if they were really in loco parentis; they indulged 
in no amusements, however innocent to them, as 
to whose moral influence the public entertained 
any degree of doubt. 



1 68 With the Professor 

Of course they were wrong; any doctor of 
philosophy could tell you that. The principle of 
measuring the virtue or vice of an act by any- 
thing else than its effect upon themselves was, 
of course, essentially false — ^but then they were 
laboring under the stern delusion that it was their 
duty to eat no meat while the world stood if they 
were thereby to make their sons to offend. They 
had not yet been introduced to the theory that 
academic conduct and instruction should be abso- 
lutely untrammeled, and that truth could be 
trusted to take care of itself, no matter into what 
receptacle you poured it. 

Best of all, they were individual. They were 
not like each other, nor like anyone else. They 
were not educational machinists, nor were they 
the products of educational machines. Their stu- 
dents were not surrendered to the mercies of a 
long printed list of automatic rules whose mere 
interpretation necessitated the services of a legal 
mind; their courses were not perfect examples 
of the lock-step, with lectures, quizzes, outlines, 



A Desperate Situation 169 

syllabi, notes, bibliographies, collateral readings 
(one hundred and fifty students required to read 
a certain chapter in a work of which at most two 
copies existed in the library, all within a week), 
topics, conferences, exhortations, threats, condi- 
tions, excommunications, indulgences, and abso- 
lutions. 

Some students proved recreant, it was true; but 
the Professor couldn't see that the lock-step 
method had greatly decreased the percentage: 
surely in vain the net was spread in the sight 
of any bird. The best students had their best 
brought out, and bore the stamp of individuality 
rather than the factory mark of a great system. 
He was very much inclined to think that the 
lock-step of the present kept students so busy 
taking notes of what others said and wrote that 
their powers of independent thinking were atro- 
phied. 

The Professor was perspiring again now, and 
had to stop and rest. He surveyed his work 
with great satisfaction, and felt encouraged. It 



170 With the Professor 

looked as if something were really going to come 
of it. 

But with the decrease of his bodily temperature, 
as he rested and reflected, came also a cooling 
of enthusiasm. However great the faith he had 
in the justice of his arraignment of college pro- 
fessors, he knew that he would get into trouble 
with them if he let the world into his confidence as 
he had planned to do. They might take no notice 
of a variety of other charges, but their conceit 
would be touched to the quick by the least in- 
sinuation that their thoroughly modern and up- 
to-date system was not infallible. They would 
tell him that he was idealizing an ancient past, 
that neither the present was so faulty nor the 
past so efficient as he liked to suppose, that pres- 
ent-day methods were a necessity, and that any- 
one who knew anything about history or evolu- 
tion could see it (the Professor was always 
floored by the evolution argument, which his 
friends frequently made use of to prove that 
whatever was [if they liked it] was right), that 



A Desperate Situation 171 

he was in his dotage, or (what in their minds 
was the most crushing charge of all) that he 
was " 'way behind the times." 

But worst of all was the fact that there was a 
traitor in the Professor's own camp. He wasn't 
quite sure in his own mind that his friends were 
not right, and that he was not idealizing the good 
old times — after the way of universal mankind. 
Perhaps everything that was zvas right. At any 
rate, he saw that his logic wasn't sufficient to prove 
that it wasn't, though he was quite as sure that 
his friends could not prove that it was; and he 
wasn't going to embitter life and waste valuable 
time by unduly provoking them — not even for 
the sake of paying his debts — which was a minor 
consideration, after all. 

This time the Professor hung up the Rake to 
stay, convinced that, at least as far as the present 
attempt was concerned, he was disqualified from 
being a successful Raker because he knew too 
much about the subject. 



CHAPTER VI 
THE PROFESSOR RECANTS 

All the world's a stage, and all the men and 
women merely players. Perhaps that the words 
of the myriad-minded poet might be fulfilled, the 
Professor himself had been guilty of a little act- 
ing. 

Not on the real stage, of course. No, he had 
been guilty of representation more serious by far 
than this: he had acted a part on the literary 
stage, with results that proved both surprising 
and disconcerting. Literary dramatics are some- 
thing less than certain; for there the audience 
has no play-bill, and your player is often believed 
to mean not only what he says, but a great deal 
more — or a great deal less; or the illusion he is 
trying to create does not succeed at all, and 

what he thinks he is making to resemble a cloud 

172 



The Professor Recants 173 

appears to the eye of the spectator as very Hke 
a camel, or a weasel. 

The Professor had not intended to deceive any 
living soul. He had made up before the literary 
footlights, just once, as a teacher of English 
literature, supposing that no one would fail to 
see through his thin disguise. That was to be 
the humor of it : it might be mildly amusing for 
readers to detect the ass in the lion's skin; for 
the Professor was a classicist, and a teacher of 
Latin, and did not usually disguise his identity. 

But the illusion had seemingly been complete, 
at least outside the circle of his acquaintance, and 
he had been writ down, not an ass, but a lion. 
After one or two appearances, certain of the 
multitude began to inquire who the professor of 
English was who wrote those queer things about 
mud and nails and salaries. The tangled web 
of deception could have been no greater if he 
had really practised to deceive. 

He indeed soon came to understand why it 
had been taken for granted he was not a clas- 



174 With the Professor 

sicist: a letter from a hitherto unknown classical 
colleague had let him into that secret. " It really 
seems so strange for any of us classical people 
to be doing anything of this kind," wrote the 
gentleman, " that I pinched myself to be sure I 
was awake." 

But if the Professor found his readers blame- 
less in this respect, he could not so readily absolve 
them from the guilt of having been too easily 
deluded into thinking him a professor of English 
literature. If he had really wanted them to be- 
lieve that, he would not have gone about it by 
manifesting a familiarity with Milton, Shake- 
speare, and the Bible. That might in the long 
ago have been the sign by which professors of 
English literature were known, but not now. No, 
he would have dropped a few hints on the Celtic 
question — ^just enough to make it appear that he 
had read the majority of the 4,000 dissertations 
on the subject — and scattered through his 
pages a few references to the sources of 
Beowulf and the commentaries of Saxo-Gram- 



The Professor Recants 175 

matlcus, and let it be known that his main in- 
terest and his real mission as a scholar was the 
determination of the number and size of the knot- 
holes in the stage of the Restoration, and a solu- 
tion of the question as to whether their distribu- 
tion was the result of nature pure and simple, or 
of rules of dramatic art formulated by Aristoph- 
anes, put into practice by Menander, and trans- 
mitted by Terence. 

But this unintentional delusion of the public, 
though regrettable enough because it defeated his 
humorous intent, was not the very head and 
front of the Professor's offense. He had de- 
ceived his readers in general, and his fellow pro- 
fessors in particular, in a more serious way. 

Here again, he had really intended nothing 
but a little mild humor; but he felt guilty, never- 
theless, and the sting of conscience was lessened 
only by the reflection that he had but allowed, 
not actually compelled, them to be deceived. 
After all, they ought to have known better than 
to take a professor's word for anything outside 



176 With the Professor 

the domain of scholarship, especially if it in- 
volved the practical. Let them look to him for 
information on the comparative frequency of the 
letter S under Caesar and Septimius Severus, but 
when it came to common sense, let them go to a 
professor of mathematics, or economics, or his- 
tory, or someone else who was accustomed to deal 
with hard facts. 

What the Professor had really done was to 
make up before his audience as a hard-working 
teacher with a large family of small children, 
engaged in a desperate struggle to keep the wolf 
from the door. His literary disguise had been 
merely incidental. 

In other words, he had been publishing a few 
thoughts on the subject of salaries, and, without 
really intending it, had proven to the satisfaction 
of all members of the teaching profession that 
they were pitifully inadequate and unjust — the 
salaries, of course — and that they ought to be 
made to meet the requirements of the calling. 
Again I mean the salaries. It had been no part 



The Professor Recants 177 

of his purpose to convince his fellow professors 
of what he felt sure they had no need to be told, 
or to confirm them in the conviction that they 
were in a bad way. He had merely wished to 
laugh them into good-humored endurance of their 
lot, or perhaps into a belief that their lot was not 
so bad, after all. If anyone at all was to take 
him seriously, he wished it might have been the 
lay public, especially legislators, trustees, regents, 
and beneficent billionaires. 

But his dramatics had suffered no such fortu- 
nate accident as that; if regents and billionaires 
had been convinced, they had at least done noth- 
ing rash in the enthusiasm of conviction, but 
had wisely kept them in the rear of their affec- 
tion, out of the shot and danger of desire. And 
as for the general public, if it had drawn any 
conclusion at all, it was to the effect that college 
professors as a class, and the Professor in par- 
ticular, were a threadbare and squalid sort of 
people, who were much to be pitied because they 
hadn't chosen a lucrative occupation. 



178 With the Professor 

On the contrary, by his little act of deception 
he had been guilty of affecting those only whom 
he did not wish to take him seriously. His im- 
personation of the poverty-pinched professor had 
left in its train a measure of discontent among 
at least some of his colleagues. 

For example, one had written him in a strain 
of mournful congratulation saying that his de- 
piction was all too true, but that he supposed 
nothing could be done about it — 

Durum, sed levius fit patientia! 

Another regretted that he had not chosen a dif- 
ferent profession, and expressed his conviction 
that if the Professor were really possessed of 
the red blood and vigor indicated by his publica- 
tions, and were still young, he could easily 
find some occupation in which he might enjoy 
real authority and get an adequate salary. 

As his correspondent was not specific, the Pro- 
fessor was left to the dark of conjecture. He 
thought over all the powerful and salaried men 



The Professor Recants 179 

of his acquaintance : brokers, lawyers, promoters, 
poHticians, plumbers, railway conductors, and 
football coaches. He didn't really envy any one 
of them but the last, who surely had both salary 
and power in the superlative degree, and it was 
impossible for the Professor to adopt his calling 
for the reason that his own faith in athletics was 
impaired by the insane and inconvenient belief 
that the main purpose of universities and colleges 
was intellectual — " the dissimulation of knowl- 
edge," as one of his co-educational students 
wrote. 

Still another had written the Professor that it 
seemed to him that " anyone who could write 
so pithy and racy an article on so dry a subject 
as The College Professor would do well to leave 
his Latin to the dead, and devote himself to lit- 
erary work — success in that line of effort meaning 
good clothes to cremate." This had caused the 
Professor to smile for weeks. For the pithy and 
racy article referred to, he had received thirty- 
eight cents per page, taken out in reprints. 



i8o With the Professor 

The Professor saw now that his pohcy had 
been wrong; he ought to have spoken unequiv- 
ocally, and not to have jested on a serious subject; 
he ought to have compared men in his own call- 
ing with masons and drainmen rather than with 
bankers and literary celebrities; and he ought to 
have been the spokesman, not of that part of 
his brethren who were really poor, but of those 
who were rich. His guilt was indeed great. 
The winter of discontent was already long 
enough — and what malefactor to be compared 
with him who lengthened or deepened it by ever 
so little! 

For there really were college professors who 
were rich, and chief among them was the Pro- 
fessor himself. There! don't get the idea that 
he had married an heiress or a vaudeville queen, 
or that his investments in Central American Rub- 
ber and Melanesian Mining Stock had actually 
yielded the results promised by his faculty friend 
who was agent for them, or that his shares in 
the Microtelophonoscope Project had brought 



The Professor Recants i8i 

forth an hundredfold, or that his savings had 
accumulated until he had a fortune. He had long 
since been calculating the matter of savings, and 
with the aid of his friend the professor of ad- 
vanced calculus had arrived at the conclusion 
that if he persevered in laying by at the present 
rate until he was eighty-two he would have 
enough to support himself and his family for 
a period of a year and three months. 

And as to the other projects — well, ask the 
first professor you meet how they turned out. 
Everyone knows about them, except the imprac- 
tical, old-fashioned, and criminally negligent few 
who cannot be brought to take advantage of 
golden opportunities to do business in a large 
way. 

No, the Professor had no more money than 
most professors have. He was just as poor as 
most of them are. And yet he was not poor. 
I know you will find it hard to believe me, but 
you must learn not to judge a man's income 
merely by his salary. If the Professor's income 



1 82 With the Professor 

had been nothing but the salary he received, he 
would have been in real truth as poor as he was 
supposed to be by his rich friends. But the fact 
was that, though very few of the general public 
realized it, and not a great many of his colleagues, 
he was in comparative affluence. He had revenues 
invisible, as well as those that could be seen of 
men. 

I see your covert smile. The very moment I 
mentioned revenues invisible, you began to think 
of Graft, and you have been thinking ever since 
of the sale of syllabuses and text-books to stu- 
dents at extortionate prices, or of secret and 
treacherous understandings with travel bureaus, 
book concerns, life insurance companies, and all 
the various promoters who manifest benevolent 
solicitude for the welfare of college professors, 
and who are willing to pay for the privilege of 
doing them good. 

Well, let us confess that there were certain 
benefits which came to the Professor along with 
his occupation. But let us not call them by so 



The Professor Recants 183 

harsh a name as graft. Graft involves at least 
the pretense of secrecy, and sometimes a measure 
of opprobrium if it becomes known; but the Pro- 
fessor had no secrets; he told everyone of his 
transactions, students and legislators included — 
and they were so far from imputing it to him 
a fault that all without exception greeted his reve- 
lations with the same mild smile of indulgence. 
His ideas as to the nature of wealth were really 
amusing. 

No, graft wasn't the name for it. Graft that 
is neither secret nor profitable never gets before 
the grand jury, never arouses resentment or envy, 
and never affords the state's attorney opportunity 
to rise in the political scale, and is not graft 
at all. Let us rather call the Professor's bonanza 
by the mild name of Perquisites. There is a 
difference between the two: we say Perquisites 
when you take what is expressly allowed you; 
Graft when you take everything not expressly 
forbidden, and as much of what is forbidden as 
you are reasonably sure will not be missed. 



184 With the Professor 

A professor with Perquisites? Certainly. 
For example, professors are by common consent 
allowed the covers and unused leaves of their 
students' examination books: a Perquisite of no 
mean value to a professor who engages in literary 
activity, or conducts an extensive correspondence, 
or has a half-dozen children in the grades. 

This Perquisite the Professor enjoyed. It 
was not very great in comparison with those en- 
joyed by many of his colleagues, it is true. He 
sometimes envied the professors of engineering 
and geology, who had long pleasure trips with 
their students to shops and mines, and came back 
with nuggets of real gold; or the professor of 
domestic science, who was reputed to have prior 
claim to the product of the experimental cuisine; 
or the professor of chemistry, who as analyst 
for the pure food commission was entitled to the 
partially despoiled packages of food and medicine 
and bottled goods of various kinds which lay 
strewn in the wake of his activities. What op- 
portunities for a professor with six children 



The Professor Recants 185 

and the expensive tastes of a sometime student 
in a European university! 

When he read of the fines resulting from 
analyses, however, and reflected that the art of 
cooking — from observation and hearsay the Pro- 
fessor had become convinced that, as taught in 
college, it was an art rather than a science — 
was still in its infancy, he reconciled himself to 
his lot. After all, it was just as well to pay 
the baker more, and economize on the doctor — 
and to make a virtue of necessity in the case of 
the bottles. That kind of virtue, he knew, was 
not of the highest quality, but a college professor 
couldn't afford to be too particular. 

And besides (here we are coming to something 
at last), the Professor had his own peculiar Per- 
quisite — one which was immeasurably more valu- 
able than those of all the rest put together. It 
was this which constituted the vast income of 
which I have spoken. 

What was it? Simply this: he was entitled 
to the interest on the funds which he handled 



1 86 With the Professor 

in his profession. Of course I don't mean funds 
in actual money. The state would never have 
intrusted the keeping of such possessions as that 
even to a professor in the school of economics 
or commerce, to say nothing of a professor of 
ancient classics. Let their subjects be never so 
practical, you couldn't get the public to disso- 
ciate professors from the impractical. The chil- 
dren of the world are wiser than the children 
of light. You may hear a chiropodist, or a slight- 
of-hand performer, or a chimney-sweep, or a 
snake-swallower, called a professor, but who ever 
heard of the name being applied to a banker, or 
a broker, or a captain of industry? 

But there are funds which are not financial, 
and there are treasure houses other than banks. 
Wise and beautiful thoughts, stored in the treas- 
ure houses of literature and the arts, also con- 
stitute wealth. The Golden Treasury is no mere 
figure of speech. Literary riches were the funds 
which the professor had in keeping. The banks 
of ancient Rome and Athens contained his prin- 



The Professor Recants 187 

cipal trusts, but he had extensive deposits in many 
other banks as well; and his duty was the ad- 
ministration of them all in the interest of the 
sons and daughters of the commonwealth. 

Now that you know the nature of the Pro- 
fessor's trust, you will be better able to under- 
stand his good fortune. His first great Perqui- 
site was the pleasure of handling it. His admin- 
istrative duties gave him the greatest delight. 

In other words, the Professor's duty was 
minister to his pleasure; he enjoyed his work; 
and since everybody knows — at least everyone 
who has read Tom Sawyer — that work which 
is enjoyable is not work at all, but play, it is 
perfectly plain that the Professor didn't have 
to work for a livelihood. He simply drew his 
salary, and went on with the fun of living. Per- 
haps he did not go so far as to say that he would 
gladly have paid for the privilege of doing what 
he was salaried to do (for where could he have 
raised the money? and no board of regents or 
trustees would have accepted his kind of cur- 



1 88 With the Professor 

rency ) ; but he agreed on the whole with a faculty 
friend who had once said to him, under strictest 
oath of secrecy : " As a matter of fact, I'd do 
just what I am doing for a great deal less: I 
like it so well ; but I suppose we'll have to appear 
dissatisfied, or they'll never raise us." 

The Professor's philosophy told him that the 
object of a salary was comfort, content, satis- 
faction with life. If this were true, and if the 
nature of his duties also brought him comfort, 
content, and satisfaction with life, it seemed to 
him that it was only fair to calculate his whole 
income by adding together his salary and his 
satisfaction. Counting the former at $1,500, and 
the latter at, say, $13,500, he ascertained that his 
real salary amounted to $15,000 — just the figure 
which he had often heard remarked on as appro- 
priate for a man with five children and no very 
expensive tastes. 

He was of course aware that to count satis- 
faction as a part of salary (unless you happened 
to be the employer) was considered very sen- 



The Professor Recants 189 

timental and unbusiness-like, or rather that it was 
not considered at all; and that most men chose 
their occupations with eye single to the currency 
value of their salaries, convinced that satisfaction 
was something that could be bought, and bought 
at any time. 

And so the Professor was not so very much 
surprised when his first commencement address, 
entitled The Fun of Working, aroused more won- 
derment than enthusiasm; or when his sopho- 
mores smiled with wise incredulity at the end of 
a little sermon like this : Young men, don't choose 
a calling merely because report says that it pays. 
The problem is not to fit yourselves for the best 
paying profession, but to find out the profession 
for which nature has already fitted you. If 
you do this, life will be filled with pleasurable 
activity; if not, all your voyage will be bound in 
shallows and in miseries. Nothing can recom- 
pense a man for doing what he hates, or a com- 
munity for the plague-spot of a discontented and 
grumbling citizen. 



190 With the Professor 

But the Professor wasn't disheartened, for he 
had the warrant of the inner man; and besides, 
he knew you couldn't tell a sophomore much about 
life. And he knew, too, that most sermons had 
a greater effect upon the preacher than upon 
the audience. 

So much for the Professor's Perquisite in the 
way of pleasurable performance of duty. He 
sometimes felt ashamed to look his friends in the 
face. Though they did receive larger salaries 
and work fewer hours, their work was really 
laborious. They had need of expensive vacation 
trips to restore their spirits; while his main 
trouble was that he could not work more hours 

in the day, and his chief use for vacation the 

* 

doing of more of his chosen work. 

But the Professor's duty did more than min- 
ister to his mere pleasure. It brought him in- 
credible profit. All the interest of the vast cap- 
ital in his hands accrued to him. Nay, we may 
say rather that the Professor was joint heir with 
all the world to the capital itself. All that he 



The Professor Recants 191 

could appropriate was his own for the term of 
his Hfe. And still further, it was not only his 
privilege to appropriate it, but he had to 
appropriate it, unless he w^as to prove recreant to 
his trust; for only by possessing it himself could 
he help his students to possess it. 

Hence it was that the Professor had already 
amassed a great fortune, and hence it was that 
year by year he grew wealthier and wealthier. 
He was rich in acquaintance with the world's 
great scenes, and he had spent years in commun- 
ion with the great spirits of all time. He " carried 
the keys of the world's library in his pocket." 
All his pleasures were made more vivid because 
of his familiarity with crystallized human ex- 
perience in literature, all his sorrows made less 
keen, all his sympathies broadened, all his judg- 
ments liberalized, all his resolutions strengthened, 
all his aspirations heightened, all his inspirations 
deepened. He saw the essence of things behind 
their material form, and dwelt in that realm 
of the glorified real which men call the ideal. 



192 With the Professor 

Yes, some of you are saying, these things may 
be all right in their way, but there is nothing 
in them. You can't convert an aspiration into 
hard cash, and literature may be ever so pleasant, 
but you can't live on the love of it, to say noth- 
ing of supporting a growing family. 

Very well, since you must be appealed to on 
that ground, I will go on to tell you how the 
Professor's love of literature really affected the 
size of his salary. Not that it actually in- 
creased the number of dollars he received; I 
only mean that it diminished his expenses — 
which is much the same when it comes to the 
question of surplus or deficit. I mean that 
where his friends in other occupations made 
a dollar satisfy one desire, he made it satisfy 
two. 

For, besides consolation, inspiration, and joy, 
the Professor had another Perquisite. He had 
appropriated from his legacy of literature an 
Aladdin's lamp. It was an ancient one: Solo- 
mon had possessed it, and Horace, and both had 



The Professor Recants 193 

recommended it. It was the lamp of philosophy; 
not the kind of philosophy that lives insphered 

In regions mild of calm and serene air, 

but that mingles in the smoke and stir of this 
dim spot which men call earth — ^philosophy of 
life, which differs from the other about as much 
as religion differs from theology, or real charity 
from humanitarianism, or education from peda- 
gogy- 

The Professor knew that riches depended not 
so much upon outward circumstances as upon 
the inward attitude. He knew that there was 
that made himself rich, and yet had nothing. 
He believed the Wise Man's precept that as a 
man thought in his heart, so was he; that the 
heart must be kept with all diligence, for out 
of it were the issues of life. So much had Solo- 
mon inscribed on the lamp. Horace had added 
that it was useless to increase wealth if desire 
was to keep pace with acquisition; that the addi- 
tion of Libya to remote Gades availed nothing 



194 With the Professor 

to one who had not learned the secret of curbing 
a greedy spirit; that those who desired much 
also lacked much, and that it was well with him 
to whom God gave with sparing hand what was 
enough. 

The Professor was old enough, and wise 
enough — you need both age and wisdom if you 
are to understand the really great lessons of 
life — to appreciate the truth of these (to most 
men) dark sayings, and sensible enough to realize 
it in actual practice. 

Of course he saw his friends in possession 
of many things which he himself could have 
enjoyed. They had roomier houses, larger libra- 
ries than his, kept automobiles and horses and 
carriages, sailed yachts, wore raiment twice dyed 
in Tyrian purple, maintained summer residences 
in distant parts of the country, always had the 
last novel on their tables, made long journeys 
to the metropolis for their drama and opera, 
ate every fruit out of its season and treated 
their dyspepsia by correspondence with high- 



The Professor Recants 195 

priced quacks thousands of miles distant, em- 
ployed a cook, a chambermaid, and a footman, 
kept a nurse for every child, never asked ques- 
tions about the monthly bills, contributed heavily 
to rummage sales, and were not driven to bank- 
ruptcy by excessive alimony. 

But the Professor saw that for him the in- 
dulgence in all or any of these things v/ould 
mean thraldom, and that life would be a round 
of sacrifice at the shrine of the unpaid bill. And 
then, the real objection to that sort of life was 
that possession did not mean satisfaction, after 
all, for he had slowly learned the lesson that 
the final satisfaction of wants and the realization 
of ideals were impossible, that life was an ascend- 
ing scale of desires. Happiness depended upon 
what one wanted, rather than on what one had. 
His friend with the $50,000 house had only a 
few days before complained of lack of space 
in the identical words which the Professor was 
wont to employ when he was in the mood of 
complaint about his house, which was anything 



196 With the Professor 

but a mansion, and was rented at that; and his 
friend's family was less numerous than his own. 
His neighbor with the $25 rod and reel cursed 
the luck in exactly the same spirit, if not in the 
same words (di deceqiie avertant), in which the 
Professor did, and by way of remedy invested 
in more tackle. The Professor went on fishing 
with his own unpretentious outfit; and when 
in moments of stress his Waltonian calm for- 
sook him, and rod and reel went into the 
depths of the lake and joined the Seven Thou- 
sand of Yesterday, he consoled himself with 
the thought that their intrinsic value was now, 
even if it had not been before, a matter of in- 
difference. 

His neighbor with the canoe wanted a launch, 
his other neighbor who had a launch was con- 
sumed with longing for a yacht, and a third who 
had sailed a yacht for one season would hear 
of nothing but a house-boat. The Professor 
went on using his rowboat, turned a deaf ear 
to the siren call, well knowing that his enjoyment 



The Professor Recants 197 

would total as much as theirs, and more. Of 
what avail to go on satisfying desires, only to 
find that satisfaction begot other desires? 

Naught's had, all's spent. 

When our desire is got without content. 

True, the Professor saw that if he had pos- 
sessed unlimited resources and no sense of moral 
obligation, much experience and much vivid 
pleasure might have been his. He could have 
gone from satisfaction to satisfaction, and could 
even have studied to create desires in order to 
experience the pleasure of gratifying them, as 
many of his countrymen did. But it was plain 
enough that with such a course would come also 
vanity and vexation of spirit, and corruption of 
the real fountains of happiness. No satisfaction 
worthy of the name would result from it. The 
full soul loathed an honeycomb; but to the hungry 
every bitter thing was sweet. Of all persons, the 
most to be disliked and the most to be pitied was 
the blase, the burnt-out being who found nothing 



198 With the Professor 

new under the sun, whose only way of breaking 
the dead monotony of existence was 

To roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. 

No, the simple Hfe was better; as well in his own 
as in Juvenal's time, voluptates commendat rarior 
usus. 

For example, his devotion to his old boat — 
prcesidio biremis scaphce — was rewarded by the 
coursing of red blood through his veins as he 
rowed it, and when the winds and waves, old 
wranglers, did their worst, he did not have to 
resort to prayers lest his yacht or launch add 
to the riches of the avaricious sea. If he was 
without the thrill of conscious power over the 
inanimate, and missed the excitement of rapid 
career through the waves, he enjoyed quite as 
much the contemplatively happy evening trips 
with his family and friends, the camp-fire and 
rude repast on the distant shore in sight of the 
city, and the quiet row home when night's candles 
were lighted in the sky. If he did not set his 



The Professor Recants 199 

table with the rarities of far-away climes, he 
enjoyed still more the unbought feast from the 
little garden whose soil he turned himself. He 
could not afford the luxury of cut flowers in 
winter, but he did not miss the prime to mark 

How sprung his plants, and how the bee 
Sat on the bloom extracting liquid sweet. 

If he could not go to the Georgian Bay, or 
to the seashore, or to lands across the ocean, he 
could enjoy still more than those who did so 
the beautiful environment in which he was placed. 

For the Professor lived in a spot whose praises 
could be fitly sung only by a Catullus or a Horace. 
That little corner of earth smiled on him beyond 
all others. He never looked across the expanse 
of Mendota from Observatory Hill without think- 
ing of Master Izaak Walton : " I tell you, scholar, 
when I sat last on this primrose bank, and looked 
down these meadows, I thought of them, as 
Charles the Emperor did of the city of Florence, 
* That they were too pleasant to be looked on 



200 With the Professor 

but only on holidays.' " Among all his Perqui- 
sites this was not far from being the greatest. 
What was the need of vast variety? If 
the soul were kept in health, it needed no more 
variety of scene than the body needed variety 
of food if it were in health. Few foods were 
necessary, or even acceptable, to the unspoiled 
palate, for 

That which is not good is not delicious 
To a well-governed and wise appetite. 

And in the same way there were few elements 
in nature which were necessary for the delight 
of the soul. Why Europe for a vacation ? Could 
an exile from his own country fly from himself 
also? Did anyone change anything but the sky 
when he went to the seashore? Did not Fear 
and Threats sit like twin brethren on the sailyards 
of the yacht, and did not Black Care climb up 
onto the house-boat, and squeeze into the auto- 
mobile, and sit on the donkey that carried the 
tourist up the Drachenfels? 



The Professor Recants 201 

The conclusion of the whole matter was that 
if he couldn't have what he liked without bowing 
under a great burden or losing the art of real 
enjoyment, he would like what he had, and let 
it go at that. If increase in worldly wealth 
meant more pleasure, it meant also more care. 
Better was an handful with quietness than both 
the hands full with travail and vexation of spirit. 
He would take the advice of Carlyle and divide 
the denominator of the fraction of life, instead 
of multiplying the numerator. If a man got 
meat and clothes, what mattered it whether he 
had f 10,000, or £10,000,000, or £70 a year. He 
could get meat and clothes for that; and he 
would find very little difference intrinsically, if 
he were a wise man. 

How charming was divine philosophy ! Surely 
this kind of philosophy was the guide of life. 
The merchandise of It was better than the 
merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than 
fine gold. When Hygeia smiled on him — and 
by Hygeia the Professor meant, not dieting and 



202 With the Professor 

the Nogoda Method, but mens sana in corpore 
sano — ^he asked for nothing more than he had. 
Hoc rrat in votis: he was happy in his little 
Sabine salary. 

So you see that, after all, the Professor led 
a life of luxury, and was fortunate beyond others 
in his choice of occupation. His financial income, 
thanks to his philosophy, was ample for his 
wants; his life was filled with peace and pleasant- 
ness; his work counted at the same time for de- 
light and for gain; he was full of the zest of 
anticipation and the satisfaction of realization; 
he was in the society of the best and the greatest 
who had ever existed, either in reality or in the 
imagination of the idealist. And all this was 
because of his Perquisites, of whose substantial 
nature men in other professions had so little ap- 
preciation that it never occurred to them to envy 
him. Without them, he would have been as 
poor as winter; with them he was as rich as 
Croesus, as the saying ran in the pre-Petroleum 
period. 



The Professor Recants 203 

When a man takes this view of the relations 
between money and happiness, it is hard to starve 
him. You can see how it was that the Pro- 
fessor's Httle salary sufficed, and how he never 
got so far behind in the long vacation as not 
to be able to catch up by March of the following 
year. And you can understand why, when he 
sat under the Thanksgiving sermon and listened 
to the long enumeration of the woes of the 
world which was designed to make him happy 
by contrast, he succeeded in realizing that there 
were a great many classes of people who were 
even below him in the scale of wretchedness, and 
why he felt guilty for being so happy and 
prosperous, and gave away, under the stress of 
conviction, money that should have gone 
to the decent clothing of his own family. 
And you can understand, too, why he was • 
conscience-stricken to think that he had uninten- 
tionally fostered the spirit of discontent in 
the hearts of his brethren rather than that 
of wise and happy acquiescence. He wished 



204 With the Professor 

that they were all even as he, except these 
bonds. 

Bonds? Of course. The Professor was hu- 
man, and sometimes fell short of the glory of 
perfect contentment. There were days when he 
was not quite convinced that a little more money 
wouldn't do him considerable good. Not that 
he wanted it for himself; he simply wanted to 
improve what he had learned from grave socio- 
logical friends to call his environment. In other 
words, the Professor was not living alone unto 
himself. He had various creditors, and he had 
a family; and neither had yet discovered as fully 
as he could have wished the economic phases of 
philosophy. Whatever his own frame of mind, 
he had to provide for the unphilosophic wants of 
his family circle. His Perquisites were not nego- 
tiable. 

And then, the Professor himself, truth compels 
me to say, was not absolutely secure in his citadel. 
Hygeia was not always propitious. Sometimes 
his sleep was not Adamic — 



The Professor Recants 205 

aery light, from pure digestion bred — 
and he was not proof against moods. At such 
times he rubbed Aladdin's lamp long and earnestly 
— and apprehensively — before the genie appeared. 
Of course you know that philosophy operates best 
when the philosopher is in a healthy frame of 
mind and body, and doesn't really need it — some- 
thing like bargains: you are not in position to 
make a really good one unless you are also per- 
fectly able to get along without it. There were 
times when the Professor felt that it would have 
been a vivid enjoyment, and one which would not 
have hurt him irretrievably, if he could have had 
a little more money than he absolutely needed. 
Sometimes, when both his liver and his imagina- 
tion were disordered, he was dangerously near 
being tempted to wish that he could have about 
two hundred dollars — yes, two hundred and fifty, 
to make perfectly sure — added to his salary : just 
enough to make his study warm and comfortable 
while he was laboring on the magnum opus which 
was to confer immortal fame upon his institution. 



2o6 With the Professor 

enough to relieve him of the care and worry- 
incident to minute economy, to increase his 
Hbrary, to provide against sickness and surgery 
in his family, to quiet his apprehensions of un- 
seemly old age and helplessness and changes of 
fashion in millinery and dressmaking, and to 
make possible a luxury or two — a real tailor-made 
suit of clothes, a new fountain pen, a cook-box 
and a safety razor, a few dollars for tickets to 
the Charity Ball to quiet his conscience for not 
having specialized in sociology, a carriage ride 
for the family two or three times a year, the 
proper advertisement of his marriageable daugh- 
ters, a trip abroad before he died, such novels 
of the month as were going to endure as long 
as the English tongue should be spoken, a pianola 

or a Victor phonograph 

But whither, O Muse, art thou tending? 
Enough, jade ! Leave off referring to the pleas- 
ures of the gods! 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PROFESSOR TRAVELS IN THE 
REALMS OF GOLD 

The Professor was not really a Monarch, and 
of course had no hope of ever becoming one. 
The only crown to which men of his profession 
ever succeeded was that of the academic despot, 
and he had so often heard of the uneasiness of 
the head that wore it that he was glad to remain 
among the happy low. 

But he had, nevertheless, some of the enjoy- 
ment peculiar to Monarchs, along with a great 
deal that was not; and as for the sorrows and 
vexation which accompany even the benevolent 
despotism, of these he had none. He was lord 
of vast domains, and they yielded him nothing 
that was not pleasure. 

It is true, he had been obliged to fight for them 
207 



2o8 With the Professor 

on his first entrance into possession; for, though 
he was Monarch by inheritance, his realms had 
not become his merely by reason of that fact. 
He had to make conquest of his own inheritance, 
as his father had done before him. From pre- 
cept and example, and soon indeed from experi- 
ence, he had learned that nothing was his own 
except as he set victorious foot upon it after 
the heat and dust of tedious campaigns: 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vatern hast, 
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen! 

But this had entailed no great hardship, except 
at first. The annexation of his realms had, for 
the most part, cost him nothing but the delight 
of exploration, and their permanent occupation 
was secured by nothing more difficult than occa- 
sional visits to them. 

They were constantly increasing, too — increas- 
ing in charm, as well as in extent. New attrac- 
tions were manifest at every tour of his do- 
minions, and wider fields became his at each 
succeeding adventure into strange territory. 



In the Realms of Gold 209 

Much had he travelled in the Realms of Gold, 
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen. 

He was Monarch of all he surveyed. Not that 
he looked like a Monarch. Not in the least. 
No one would ever have suspected in him 
a person of royal blood or power. And, as a 
matter of fact, he cut but a sorry figure in the 
council of the nations. His manner of referring 
to his kingdom as the Realms of Gold was amus- 
ing to the other members of the council. The 
Monarch of the Realms of Iron laughed at him 
and his pretensions, and offered him the post of 
Prefect in the Province of Polypecunia, and the 
Monarch of the Realms of Brass tendered him 
a Governorship in the Multiloquentic Peninsula. 
These were much coveted positions, they said : he 
would make himself a name, and acquire wealth 
that was really worth while, and would besides 
experience the satisfaction of being really useful. 

But he preferred his Realms of Gold, though 
their extent and charm were not apprehended by 
the many, and their coin was not everywhere 



2IO With the Professor 

honored at its full value. Their peaceful calm 
and quiet, the clearness of their skies, and the 
purity of their atmosphere were more to be de- 
sired than all else. 

He had begun to visit and lay claim to his 
waiting dependencies while still only heir-appar- 
ent — ^almost in his infancy. From the time he 
had sat on the Queen Regent's knee with the 
old Sanders' Primer open at the page where the 
gentleman in the top hat was pointing to the 
sunrise and saying to the little boy and girl : 

The sun is up, and we are up 
too. Can you see the sun ? — 

even from that now far distant day he had been 
constantly annexing new territory, and adding 
to the realms which, through all his life, yielded 
such a revenue of delight. 

Those first domains were circumscribed enough, 
but they seemed to him world-wide, and traveling 
was painful. He grew footsore and weary, and 
mutiny rose in his heart; he declared that he had 



In the Realms of Gold 211 

traveled enough, that his kingdom was sufficient 
as it was. 

But he was bidden to rest a while, and have 
patience; and then the Queen Regent, his kindly 
guide, again pointed the way, and again he 
trudged on, in spite of the temptation to stop 
and engage forever in the unkinglike diversion 
of making mud pies (elementary ceramics, it 
came to be called in after time), or of covert 
experiment with forbidden tools in the woodshed 
(manual training was the later name for that). 
For the children of royalty are like other chil- 
dren: their main business in life is play. 

As if their whole vocation 
Were endless imitation. 

And then, you understand, he was not so 
severely civilized by the Queen Regent as most 
princeHngs in worldly courts. He was allowed 
to range with great freedom over his demesne, 
and encouraged to mingle with his subjects. He 
soon began to make dehghtful acquaintances and 



212 With the Professor 

fast friends, and before long discovered that the 
fields he was exploring were populous with boys 
and girls and animals and flowers, and that even 
mud pies and pounding in the woodshed were not 
so sufficient for lifelong entertainment as he had 
supposed. 

He met the little boy with curly hair and 
pleasant eye, 

A boy who always loved the truth. 
And never, never told a lie. 

And Old Rover, too, he discovered. Immortal 
Old Rover, Idea existing only in the mind of 
God, and yet the familiar friend of every child; 
not of this world, yet more real than the real — 
surely 

Old Rover was the finest dog 
That ever ran a race! 

When will Justice and her sister, incorruptible 
Fidelity, and unspotted Truthfulness ever find 
his equal — 

Quando ullum inveniet parem? 



In the Realms of Gold 213 

He had found Old Rover on the confines of 

a wide plain, and one of his later visits to his 

four-footed friend was memorable: — 

One day he stole his hat, and ran 
Away across the plain 

The mysterious and reposeful sense of the vast- 
ness of that plain never faded in after life from 
the mind of the little prince. God was in it, 
the same God 

That made the sky so bright and blue, 

That made the grass so green; 
That made the flowers that smell so sweet. 

In pretty colors seen. 

And God, too, as well as Old Rover and the 
Little Boy, became his acquaintance^ — a strange 
Being, black-eyed and partially bald, with mus- 
tache and goatee, high toward the zenith in a 
blue southeastern sky, and, on the whole, benev- 
olent. To Him he prayed, or with Him, rather, 
he learned to converse: 

O Lord, as now I bend my knee, 
And lift my heart and voice to Thee, 
Hear what a child can say. 



214 With the Professor 

In the course of time, traveling became easier. 
The feet were less sore, the muscles less weary, 
the spirit more hopeful and enduring. He even 
acquired a measure of independence, and made 
short excursions without his guide. The of- 
tener and the farther he pushed into the land 
of the unknown, the greater the ease with 
which he moved^ and the greater his courage 
and hopefulness in the face of each new 
expedition. 

The time indeed soon came when vivid pleasure 
and excitement attended his adventures. He 
came upon landscapes of unsuspected charm. 
New realms swimmed into his ken. He formed 
acquaintance with persons and peoples of the 
widest and deepest diversity and interest. Thad- 
deus of Warsaw, Ivanhoe, and the Scottish 
Chiefs, Little Em'ly and Oliver and Nicholas 
Nickleby, The Wolf Boy in China, the fine old 
Grandfather and his Tales of heroic men and 
women in Caledonia, stern and wild — what brave 
and delightful people ! And the lands of Gulliver 



In the Realms of Gold 215 

and Crusoe, and the Field of Ice — ^what enchant- 
ing possessions! And Arabia — 

And many a sheeny summer morn, 
Adown the Tigris he was borne, 
By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold. 
High-walled gardens green and old; 
True Mussulman was he and sworn. 
For it was in the golden prime 
Of good Haroun-Alraschid. 

There came a day at length, after much boyish 
delight, when the Queen Regent and her Ad- 
visers told him he must go beyond the confines 
of the more immediate provinces, and enter terri- 
tory where people spoke other tongues : there he 
would find beautiful new domains waiting, and 
on his return would look with new eyes on the 
old. They themselves had been there, and his 
ancestors also had gone up into the land to pos- 
sess it. 

He set out, but w^ith hot rebellion in his heart : 
his possessions were already great, and life was 
short; the way was hard; there were thorns and 



2i6 With the Professor 

thickets; the land was far away. And besides, 
he doubted its attractiveness and rewards. He 
had seen travelers return from it in discourage- 
ment, and he knew of many who could not be 
persuaded to start at all. 

But he was led on, and even driven, in spite 
of his questionings, in spite of his protests. And 
the way was hard. He had to learn once more 
what it was to be footsore, and weary, and cast 
down. 

Happily, however, his guides and monitors did 
not cease their benevolent offices. In due time, 
after much toil and perspiration, he rose from 
the jungle to the foothills, from the foothills to 
the mountain ridges, and thence to peaks and 
promontories whence his vision, like a Hannibal's 
from the Alps, reached far and wide down to 
rich and well-watered plains. 

Again and again he responded to exhortation 
and climbed, and again and again saw glorious 
lands of promise. He made partial descents into 
them, too, his guides leading the way — for, after 



In the Realms of Gold 217 

the ascent and the promontories, the way was 
inclined and easier — and returned home filled with 
the satisfaction of wholesome fatigue after the 
exhilaration of successful excursion into fruitful 
expanses. 

And now he again became independent and 
trustful. Constant repetition of his experiences 
led him to see that the vision of his elders was 
farther-reaching than his own, and that he could 
do nothing better for not only his profit, but for 
his delight, than to heed their admonition. Faith 
became his, the substance of things hoped for, 
the evidence of things not seen. By faith the 
walls of his difficulty fell down, and he sojourned 
in the land of promise. 

Happily for him, his guides did not leave off 
insisting until they had given him glimpses of 
lands still more distant, had pointed to far re- 
moved heights on the horizon beyond which their 
own faith told them were still more and more 
fruitful realms. By the time they had let him go 
from their hand, he was ready to be his own 



21 8 With the Professor 

guide and inspirer, and needed no spur beyond his 
own eager desire. 

Now began his real travel, and his real ob- 
servation. The deHghts of exploration and an- 
nexation were multiplied. He went on to newer 
and ever greater realms. . . . And yet he 
fell short of the glory of perfect enjoyment; for, 
now that he had dismissed his guides, he had a 
sense of loneliness, and something of the disquiet 
of those who travel with no purpose. And so it 
came about that he determined to be a guide in 
his turn. This would multiply his delight, be- 
sides making him, in ever greater measure, the 
master of his territories; and it would be a stim- 
ulus to explore and annex wider and wider realms. 

Hence it was that the Professor was a Mon- 
arch, and that, too, over ever increasing Realms 
of Gold. The passes to the world's provinces, 
ancient and modern, were his, and duty called 
him to journey through them all. He not only 
explored new fields where the yellow grain was 
ready for the hand of the reaper, but also gleaned 



In the Realms of Gold 219 

from the old. For in some way, after every 
reaping in the new, he found more and more to 
glean from the old. They were rich — richer by 
far than the fields of Boaz, where Ruth stood in 
tears amid the alien corn — and his intellectual and 
spiritual garner was filled with Golden treasure. 
He knew the heroes of the epic, from the surge 
and thunder of the Odyssey to him that rode 
sublime 

Upon the seraph wings of extasy 
The secrets of the abyss to spy. 

And with them he passed the flaming bounds of 
place and time. The dramatists, too, were his 
familiars — the great ancients 

Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line. 
Or the tale of Troy divine. . . 
Or what, though rare, of later age, 
Ennobled hath the buskined stage. 

Mild Herodotus, the calm genius of Plato, the 
streaming eloquence of Cicero, the genial good 
sense and exquisite expression of Horace, the 
glowing high-mindedness of Livy, the vivacity of 



220 With the Professor 

kaleidoscopic Apuleius — all these, and much else, 
had entered into his possession, with the long line 
of those who had enriched the world in like 
manner in his own tongue and in other tongues 
of his time. 

And his was not merely a cold and intellectual 
acquaintance, with men and nations in the ab- 
stract. He knew individuals of real flesh and 
blood, in ages both past and present. Gentle 
Sophocles, Euripides the human, rollicking 
Plautus, sympathetic Virgil, gloomy Dante, rare 
Ben Jonson, austere Milton — were all intimate 
acquaintances of his, some of them warm friends 
with whom he could converse and commune, and 
from whom he could learn noble lessons; and he 
had a host of lesser acquaintances whom he knew 
as well, if not so personally. 

And these were not all. He had also made 
scores of friends in the provinces of the imagina- 
tion^ — the most human children of the world's 
most generous minds. To the cherished com- 
panions of his bo3^hood he now added Colonel 



In the Realms of Gold 221 

Newcome and Ethel, Esmond and the Warring- 
tons, Sidney Carton and Tony Weller, Captain 
Cuttle and Dolly Varden, Bishop Bienvenue and 
Wilhelm Meister, Joost Avelingh, Renzo and 
Lucia, Quixote and Sancho, Orlando and Beatrice, 
Falstaff and Rosalind, Tartarin and Dogberry — 
an endless procession of infinite variety; human 
life idealized and concentrated. For the excel- 
lence of the Realms of Gold is that in them famil- 
iarity breeds no contempt, virtue provokes no en- 
vious hatred, villainy no fear; and there are only 
rare cases of that insidious mingling of good and 
evil in the same vessel which in actual Hfe baffles 
the understanding and renders impossible the 
hatred of vice and love of virtue, so much coveted 
because of their repose fulness. 

His wealth was boundless. His territories 
were wide, his revenues immense. Spiritual rev- 
enues. For every province in his dominions he 
had a soul. He understood now why Goethe had 
said that a man had as many souls as he knew 
languages; and he proved the truthfulness of 



222 With the Professor 

Ennius, who declared that he had three hearts, 
because he knew Greek, Oscan, and Latin. He 
had two ancient souls, and almost an embarrass- 
ment of modern ones. He was, by turns, ancient 
and modern, Greek and Roman, European and 
American, Latin and Teuton. 

For his old guides had helped him forge " the 
keys of the world's libraries," and now he carried 
them in his pockets; and these were also the 
keys to the hearts of the nations. He dwelt 
continually in lands beyond the sea. He had, 
indeed, seen foreign countries in the flesh, but 
his actual traveling abroad in the body was as 
nothing compared with his traveling in the 
Realms of Gold. 

For in his travels in the Realms of Gold he 
was abroad, not only in space, but in time also. 
He saw there immeasurably more than he had 
ever seen in the flesh, and it sharpened his vision. 
The cumulative effect of ideal experience upon 
real, and of real upon ideal, filled his life with 
richness. He had never really been in Spain, 



In the Realms of Gold 223 

but its castles were his nevertheless, with the 
chateaux and cathedrals of France. He had 
roamed in the flesh among real ruins, and in the 
spirit among ruins he had never seen. Or by 
the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po, where he had 
actually set foot, or in lands upon which his 
eyes had never rested, he knew and sympathized 
with the smiles and tears and hopes and fears of 
men most widely separate. 

But the Realms were filled for his delight not 
only with the spirits of men. In the same do- 
mains he found much else. He learned 

To love the high embowed roof, 
With antique pillars massy-proof, 
And storied windows richly dight. 
Casting a dim religious light. 

He frequented the long-drawn aisle and fretted 
vault of many a noble cathedral, and felt his 
soul dissolve into ecstasies when he heard the 
pealing anthem swell the note of praise. From 
the Parthenon to Cologne, from the awful Jove 
that Phidias wrought to the giants of Michel- 



224 With the Professor 

angelo, from the Pompeian walls to Corot, 
the galleries of the world's beautiful forms and 
colors were his to roam through, and its great 
piles of architecture his to worship in. 

Nor did Nature yield less than Art the secrets 
of her beauty and harmony. Whoso traveled 
well the Realms of Gold did not fail rightly to 
spell 

Of every star that heaven doth shew, 
And every herb that sips the dew. . . . 

He had inexhaustible natural resources. 

He was rich in flowers and trees, 
Humming birds and honey bees. 
Laughed the brook for his delight, 
Through the day and through the night. . . 
His, on bending orchard trees. 
Apples of Hesperides. . . 
Still, as his horizon grew. 
Larger grew his riches too. 

All his experiences were emphasized and clari- 
fied by knowledge of the experience of other 



In the Realms of Gold 225 

men and other times. Every enjoyment of daily 
life was heightened, deepened, and broadened, 
even to the most commonplace. 

Full many a glorious morning had he seen 

even from childhood; but his delight when he 
saw the first envious streaks begin to lace the 
severing clouds in yonder east was multiplied 
as he thought of night's candles burnt out, and 
jocund day standing tiptoe on the misty mountain 
tops; or beheld the morn, in russet mantle clad. 

Walk o*er the dew of yon high eastward hill. 

Dew had always been a familiar and a pleasant 
phenomenon, and he knew its physical cause; but 
he had never looked upon it with eyes that saw 
until in the Realms of Gold he came upon it 

Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass. 

The heavens, too, had always declared the 
glory of God to him in no uncertain way; but 
they became vocal when once he had lifted eyes 



226 With the Professor 

to them and their starry hosts from a watch-tower 
in the Realms : 

Soon as the evening shades prevail. 

The moon takes up the wondrous tale; 

And nightly to the listening earth, 

Repeats the story of her birth; 

Whilst all the stars that round her burn. 

And all the planets, in their turn, 

Confirm the tidings as they roll, 

And spread the truth from pole to pole. 

The chastened and subdued pleasure of the hours 
of twilight, 

When o'er the hill the eastern star 
Tells bughtin'-time is near, my jo. 

And owsen frae the furrow'd field 
Return sae dowf and wearie O; 

and when the gray-hooded even. 

Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed, 

Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phoebus* wain, 

was increased infinitely at the recollection of a 
calm spot he had once visited in a distan^^rt 
of his possessions: 



In the Realms of Gold ^27 

Ueber alien Gipfeln 

1st Ruh. 

In alien Wipfeln 

Spiirest du 

Kaum einen Hauch; 

Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde. 

Warte nur! balde 

Ruhest du auch. 

And when the shadows of the mountains 
lengthened, and wearied oxen were freed from 
the yoke, and the chariot of the sun sank from 
sight and repose settled over the land-— 

Sol ubi montium 
Mutaret umbras et iuga demeret 
Bobus fatigatis amicum 
Tempus agens abeunte curru; 

when the glimmering landscape faded on the 
sight, and all the air a solemn stillness held, and 
the time came for Nature's soft nurse 

to weigh his eyelids down 
And steep his senses in forgetfulness, 

what gentle comfort to think of Sappho's dark- 
eyed Sleep, the Child of Night; or of how 



228 With the Professor 

the honey of care-charming sleep 
Softly begins through all their veins to creep; 

or of 

the drowsy-flighted steeds 
That draw the litter of close-curtained sleep; 

or of the Mantuan's gentle lines: 

Vertitur interea caelum et ruit Oceano nox, 
Involvens umbra magna terramque polumque. . . 
Tempus erat, quo prima quies mortalibus aegris 
Incipit et dono divum gratissima serpit. 

And not only his present enjoyment, but his 
past, was thus made more clear-cut and vivid. 
He remembered his experience in foreign lands 
with added appreciation because he had em- 
balmed his impressions, so to speak, in the verses 
of great poets: 

The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece! 
Where burning Sappho loved and sung ; 

the seas whose tides rose and fell among the 
shining Cyclades, where 

Wandering in youth, he traced the path of him, 
The Roman friend of Rome's least mortal mind ; 



In the Realms of Gold 229 

or the leafy and mysterious North, the Germania 
horrida of the Roman poets, where 

The castled crag of Drachenfels 
Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine, 
Whose breast of waters broadly swells 
Between the banks which bear the vine ; 

Italy, great mother of fruits, Saturnian land, 
mother of heroes; oHve-silvery Sirmio; the Ap- 
pian Way, Regina Viarum; Rome, Urhs Sterna; 
Crete, the land of the hundred cities; golden 
Mycenae, low-lying Ithaca, and horse-feeding 
Argos — ^what dehght in the continued vision of 
such scenes ! As he looked forth from his palace, 
it was through Magic Windows, and his eyes took 
the wings of the morning and dwelt in the utter- 
most parts of the earth, and traversed the utter- 
most reaches of time. 

With natural phenomena it was the same. 
What to those who lived in the Realms of Iron 
and Brass was merely water, fog, and storm, was 
to him the wine-dark sea, the misty deep, the 
many-surging sea; what to them was only the 



230 With the Professor 

slapping of water against the prow at nightfall 
was to him the loud crying out of the waves as 
the ship sped on while the sun sank and shadows 
covered all the ways. The sight of an ocean 
steamship lying at dock suggested to them only 
men and merchandise — those that went down to 
sea in ships, that did business in great waters; 
but he never looked on one of these monsters 
without seeing in spirit the works of the Lord, 
and his wonders in the deep; without a certain 
expansion of the soul, a mystical apprehension 
of the infinitudes of the ocean plain: 

Where lies the land to which the ship would go? 
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. 
And where the land she travels from? Away, 
Far, far behind, is all that they can say. 

Yes, and more — the Realms themselves con- 
tributed to their own interest and charm by apt 
self-descriptive phrase. Who needed words of 
his own to characterize 

Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry, 

Or rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire, 
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre? 



In the Realms of Gold 231 

or the 

Mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies. . , 
God-gifted organ-voice of England? 

Even his humor had become Golden. To tell 
his suffering friend in the department of philos- 
ophy 

For there was never yet philosopher 

That could endure the toothache patiently ; 

or to refer to his traveling friend as one who 
went to and fro in the earth and walked up and 
down in it; or to his friend who lectured, as one 
who spoke an infinite deal of nothing, more than 
any man in all Venice; or to say to a loquacious 
friend that he would that his horse had the speed 
of his tongue, and so good a cont inner — such 
gentle and harmless shafts of wit as these gave 
him no end of pleasure. 

His religion itself It was so wrapped up 

in poetry — poetry of word, of sound, of plastic 
expression, of ceremonial, of color, of thought — 
that he sometimes wondered (to the scandal of 



232 With the Professor 

his own conscience) whether there was any re- 
Hgion besides poetry, or any poetry besides re- 
ligion; whether the Bible contained Hterature 
because it was religious, or whether it contained 
religion because it was literature. He knew no 
Art, whether in church, or in libraries, or in 
galleries, or in its most exquisite expression of 
all, human character, whose effect upon him was 
not identical with that which many called by the 
name religious. 

For you must know that his Realms did more 
than merely to delight him. Had they done no 
more, they would have performed but an Epicu- 
rean function, and would have been worthy to 
come into condemnation along with Epicurean- 
ism. 

No, their effect was more than Epicurean. 
They were a useful, and — ^more than that — a 
dynamic force in his life. The Realms of Gold 
had formed his speech when it was tender and 
stammering, they had turned his ear away from 
unworthy converse, had instilled friendly pre- 



In the Realms of Gold 233 

cepts into his heart, corrected his roughness and 
temper, set before his eyes the record of deeds 
well done, instructed his rising years with well- 
known examples, solaced him when in need and 
sick. 

Yes, consoled and strengthened his heart in 
time of trouble and affliction. The arrows of 
fortune lost half their power to harm when he 
put himself in place of the Duke he had met in 
the Realms: 

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: 
This wide and universal theater 
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene 
Wherein we play in. 

Tedious nights of illness were not without allevia- 
tion as he lay waiting more than they that watch 
for the morning. His courage always rose when 
he remembered: 

Great lords, wise men ne'er sit and wail their loss, 
But cheerly seek how to redress their harms. 
What though the mast be now blown overboard. 
The cable broke, the holding-anchor lost. 



234 With the Professor 

And half our sailors swallowed in the flood? 
Yet lives our pilot still. . . 
Why, courage then! What cannot be avoided 
'Twere childish weakness to lament or fear. 

Black Care lost half its power to torment when- 
ever he recalled from his experience in the Realms 
of Gold that it had pursued humanity on the 
Sacra Via as well as on Regent Street, and that 
no lot was wholly happy — 

nihil est ab omni 
Parte beatum. 

Even Pallid Death had been so robbed of its 
terrors by the genial melancholy of poets ancient 
and modern that he almost felt 

That when the Angel of the darker Drink 
At last should find him by the river-brink, 

And, offering the Cup, invite his Soul 
Forth to his lips to quaff — he should not shrink. 

Nor was he less inspired to excel in the sterner 
and more active phases of life. His steadfast- 
ness was always greater at thought of the upright 
man, tenacious of his purpose: 



In the Realms of Gold 235 

lustum et tenacem propositi virum 
Non civium ardor prava iubentium 
Non vultus instantis tyranni 
Mente quatit solida neque Auster. 



His resolve to measure up to the ideal of the 
four-square man never failed to be strengthened 
by the recollection of him that sweareth to his 
own hurt and changeth not. It v^as impos- 
sible for one to rest content with being less than 
ideally honorable and patriotic who had known 
so many patriots and heroes in the Realms of 
Gold. 

So you see that the Professor was not of the 
worldly kind of Monarchs — 

So shaken as they are, so wan with care — 

who bear the burdens of a real state. No, 
his joys were greater than fall to their lot, 
his sorrows less, his possessions more easily 
administered, his revenues more abundant. He 
had no courtiers to obscure his vision of the 
truth; he was face to face with it, and it made 



236 With the Professor 

him free. He had no flatterers to pervert his 
mind and his heart. His Counselors in the 
Realms of Gold were always sincere, always at 
their best, and always the chosen of the earth. 
They never obtruded their attentions upon him; 
and yet they were his constant companions, 
wherever he was. They delighted him at home, 
wrought him no ill anywhere, stayed with him 
through the watches of the night, multiplied the 
joys of his good fortune, and in adversity af- 
forded him a refuge and a solace. Because of 
them his courage was higher, his religion deeper, 
his sympathy broader, his vision clearer, his 
action more sane, his self-control greater. 

Thus it was that he lived life ever and ever 
more abundantly. He was possessed of real roy- 
alty, and of real riches. You would not rightly 
call rich him who possesses many things; more 
rightly he lays claim to the title of the rich who 
knows how to make wise use of the gifts of the 
gods, who knows how to endure poverty, who 
fears dishonor worse than death, who is not 



In the Realms of Gold 237 

afraid to die for his dear friends or for his 
country. Every person he met, every lec- 
ture he heard, every book he read, every paint- 
ing, statue, or edifice he saw, every scene he 
looked on, every emotion he felt was more vivid 
to him because of the Realms of Gold. He had 
found wisdom there, and got understanding. 
His eyes saw, his ears heard, his spirit appre- 
hended an infinity of things not visible nor audi- 
ble nor sensible. His low-vaulted past had grad- 
ually grown into a dome more vast, wherein the 
glories of the world of art were displayed for 
his profit and his delight, and where the voices 
of time were echoing and re-echoing in grand 
diapason. 

Happy destiny! The Professor's duties were 
ministers to his profit and to his pleasure; 
he best served his own ends in serving the 
ends of others. He looked forward with 
pleasant anticipation: he was to continue in the 
delights of possession and acquisition. All the 
days of his years he was to travel on, seeing the 



238 With the Professor 

cities and learning the minds of men, increasing 
in understanding of men and things, 

Till old experience did attain 

To something like prophetic strain. 

And, greatest of all, he was to continue in the 
delight of showing his realms to others, and in 
the blessedness of helping them also to possess. 
That was his exceeding rich reward. 

He was a beneficent Monarch. He dispensed 
no favors of the ordinary kind. He had no 
minor posts to bestow, no little tridents and 
sapphire crowns to confer. These would have 
seemed to him but petty rewards. He had noth- 
ing but Thrones to offer. He created noth- 
ing but Monarchs, and there was no limit to the 
number of his Crowns. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE PROFESSOR LAUGHS AT 
EDUCATION 

The Professor's heart was inditing a good 
matter. Go to, he said to himself, I will speak 
of the things which I have thought touching edu- 
cation: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer. 

But Himself rose in objection: what right 
have you to speak touching education? You 
are not a specialist in education: you haven't 
written a history of pedagogy, or books on adoles- 
cence. You haven't edited an educational jour- 
nal. You are not an institute conductor, or an 
inspector, or a superintendent. You aren't even 
a professor of education. You are only an old 
fogy professor of classical literature. Who's 
going to listen to you? 

Yes, you are right, replied the Professor. I 
239 



240 With the Professor 

am not a professor of education, nor any other 
of the functionaries you mention. Worse than 
that, I have never had a course in normal school, 
I haven't published suggestions regarding the 
enrichment of the curriculum or the correlation 
of primary education with practical experience, 
nor subscribed to the spelling reform, nor written 
textbooks, nor proposed a single revolutionary 
or sensational plan, nor done any of the things 
which make men known and adored in educa- 
tional circles, and get them called to positions 
of greater usefulness and higher salaries. I am 
only a professor of classical literature, and an 
old fogy one at that. I don't suppose anyone will 
listen to me; but I am going to talk, if my words 
are wasted on desert air. 

And besides, your implication isn't justifiable. 
I may not be the kind of specialist you have in 
mind, but I maintain that I am a specialist in 
education, nevertheless. I've studied it, and prac- 
tised it, and lived it — handled the real thing — for 
years and years, and I know what it is and 



He Laughs at Education 241 

what it ought to be just as well as any of your 
precocious doctors of philosophy — 

As smooth as Hebe's their unrazored lips — 

who write BOOKS about it. Why, IVe taught 
everything from the ABC's to archeology, from 
primary to post-graduate: I've taught in city 
and country, in private and public schools; I've 
taught in big institutions and little; I've taught 
classes and I've taught individuals, old and young, 
male and female, native and foreign, at home and 
abroad; I've taught for credit to be applied on 
the sabbatical, and I've taught for Cash and let 
the Credit go, and I've taught for fun; I've taught 
doctors of philosophy and Sisters of Mercy and 
Daughters of the Revolution, and I've taught 
other people's children and my own. 

And I've been taught, too. I, too, have jerked 
back my hand under the ferule, copied my own 
faults down the writing-page, done partial pay- 
ments and the six per cent, method, told Crom- 
well that curfew shall not ring to-night; and 



242 With the Professor 

since the termination of my twenty-five years of 
formal instruction, I have been getting some real 
education by instructing others. 

And more than that, I've been educated in 
the school of experience. I have never studied 
sociology, but I am married and have children ; I 
have never had a course in domestic science, but 
I don't have to resort to the restaurant when the 
head of my domestic science department comes 
home late from the Working Club; I have never 
had a course in commerce, but I have been a book 
agent, and have maintained a household under a 
protective tariff regime; I have never studied 
medicine or pharmacy or journalism, but I have 
worked on a real newspaper and have contributed 
an appendix to the history of surgical science 
and know the savor of poppy and mandr agora and 
all the drowsy sirups of the world. And if you 
can't see that real understanding of the subject- 
matter and methods and purposes of education is 
better acquired by actual experience than by the 
reading of endless books and periodicals, and 



He Laughs at Education 243 

the hearing of endless lectures, and the making 
of endless charts, and the conducting of endless 
elaborate experimentation, and the advocating of 
endless new schemes — why, then, you'd better be 
classed with those who think themselves literary 
because they write dissertations on dentals in 
Dante, or with those who consider themselves re- 
ligious because they are learned in comparative 
theology, or with any others who haven't yet dis- 
covered the difference between the dead letter 
and the living spirit. 

And then, I'm not absolutely without what you 
consider the real specialist's qualifications. I 
have actually attended a teachers' institute or two, 
and I could show you some very interesting notes 
I took there — columns of words usually mispro- 
nounced: cement, Sebastopol, gigantic; expres- 
sions of which we should be more careful : at all, 
not a tall; food, not victuals; speak, not talk; 
is it not, not isn't it; lists of teachers' faults, 
observed, set in a note-book, learned, and conned 
by rote, to cast into my teeth; suggestions for 



244 With the Professor 

making geography vital; how to make grammar 
interesting to a dull pupil; thrice underscored 
directions not to punish in anger, to govern by 
love and not by fear, to insure proper deportment 
by directing the child's energies into appropriate 
channels, etc., etc. 

Yes, and I have read books on education, and 
have served on the board of visitors to the 
kindergarten, and have listened to special lectures 
on pedagogy. Why shouldn't I, too, write? 
Must I always be merely a reader? While men 
all around me are publishing the results of world- 
wide reading and experiment, and proving by 
elaborate array of charts and statistics that 
children like best what is most interesting to 
them, and that, other things being equal, bright 
and healthy children remember with greater facil- 
ity than dull and anemic ones, and that morning 
is a better time for study than afternoon, and 
that discipline is improved by the co-operation of 
parents, and that country children know more 
than city children about robins and rutabagas, 



He Laughs at Education 245 

whereas city children know more than their coun- 
try cousins about candy and cathartic — in short, 
that the property of rain is to wet and fire to 
burn — am I, too, not to waste some of the na- 
tion's fast decreasing paper supply? 

Having thus settled matters with Himself, the 
Professor and his heart went on inditing. For 
the fact is, the Professor had for some time been 
gathering discontent, not to say wrath. Whether 
with perfect justice, he was not absolutely sure; 
but he was at least so sure of it that he could 
not withstand the impulse to express himself, 
which was as irresistible with him as it is with 
most specialists. 

He was, of course, aware that he would be 
called old-fashioned and unprogressive; or dis- 
senter or nonconformist; or fossil; or pre- Adam- 
ite or antediluvian; or plain kicker or crank; or 
impractical; or, worst of all, idealist; — but he 
knew that he was not alone, and that there was 
an abundance of people who would welcome a 
spokesman. And besides, to be called by any or 



246 With the Professor 

all of these names was no worse than being called 
theorist or utilitarian. 

He picked up his pen. . . . But it refused 
obedience. Somehow, his discontent did not 
focus. As he meditated his attack, he couldn't 
help noticing that no phase of the educational 
system was wholly bad. For example, there was 
the kindergarten. The kindergarten, so far as the 
Professor could see, had not only never done his 
children the least harm, but had proven a great 
source of comfort and profit to Mrs. Professor, 
who had employed the time saved her by the 
kindergarten teacher in attending child-study 
classes at the Woman's Club, and in listening to 
lectures on " The Ideal Mother " by Associate 
Professor Virginia di Ana of the department of 
domestic science in the university. 

If the Professor had any fault at all to find 
with the kindergarten, it was that it did not 
begin with the child early enough, and did not 
demand more of its time; but possibly he was 
there only reflecting the views of Mrs, Professor, 



He Laughs at Education 247 

who had been chairman of a committee to agitate 
the question of lowering the age of admission 
from four years to three-ninety-nine (this was 
to be an entering wedge toward a two-year Hmit), 
of enlarging the curriculum by the addition of 
courses in millinery, dining-room design, and 
dietetics, and of introducing the principle of free 
election. The catalogues of Boston, Chicago, 
Kalamazoo, Kankakee, and Kinnickinnic, which 
were acknowledged to be the great kindergarten 
centers of the world, showed that these features 
were in successful operation there, and an ex- 
haustive study of Froebel and Pestalozzi yielded 
indisputable evidence that the systems of the 
great masters also had contemplated exactly what 
the committee proposed. 

Nor was it the grades which were the prime 
cause of the Professor's discontent, though he 
had heard ancient, ill-balanced, and unprogres- 
sive people raising voices in timid protest, and 
had at times felt like taking sides with them. 
Some of them had ventured to suggest that a 



248 With the Professor 

little less attention to what might be termed the 
trimmings — the marching, games, dramatics, mod- 
eling in clay, story-telling, sewing, and the like — 
and a little more concentration upon the main 
purpose of the grade school, namely, to insure 
a reliable knowledge of fundamentals, would be 
a good thing. Children in these days, they said, 
didn't seem to know as much reading, writing, 
and arithmetic as they used to in the old district- 
school days when the teacher taught for ten 
dollars a month and boarded 'round, and children 
hadn't yet learned that it wasn't hygienic to spit 
on their slates. 

The Professor had thought so too, but when he 
stopped to reflect that it was a fine thing for 
a boy to know how to saw a board in two, or 
drive a nail, or for a girl to know how to use 
the scissors and rolling-pin, he thought that per- 
haps the gain in one direction might counterbal- 
ance the loss in the other — though the demon 
Doubt did sometime suggest to him that boys and 
girls could hardly escape knowing these things 



He Laughs at Education 249 

in the ordinary course of events, whether they 
were taught in school or not. He could remem- 
ber none of his childhood playmates who couldn't 
and didn't drive nails, and who didn't do con- 
siderable successful clay modeling, though they 
hadn't yet learned to call it by that precise name; 
and as for carpenter work, though his own saw- 
ing had not been exactly fancy work, he couldn't 
remember when he hadn't known the difference 
between a hawk and a handsaw when the wind 
was southerly. 

Something more might be said for the ob- 
jection of his friends to the frequent changes of 
method in teaching and administration, and for 
their charge that the whole common school system 
was in a state of constant experimentation. What 
with institutes and associations, where teachers 
were continually listening to advocates of new 
ways to do old things; what with journals and 
books, where they were continually reading the 
same kind of material; and what with educational 
specialists who conducted experimental schools 



250 With the Professor 

and classes, and who toured the country, spread- 
ing their infinite variety of ideas viva voce; and 
what was worse, by way of the educational press 
(for the sight of a speciahst is often a corrective 
to his words), the average teacher in the rank 
and file was kept in a state of bewilderment be- 
fore the kaleidoscopic change of recommenda- 
tions, and was so taken up with attempting to 
put into practice all the multitudinous pedagog- 
ical suggestions that she had no energy left for 
real teaching. 

The Professor had heard of this variety and 
variability of methods, but he gained no real 
comprehension of the extent to which madness 
had got into method until he bought a dozen first 
and second readers for use with his little daugh- 
ter, whom he was instructing in private. Some 
had printing only; some printing and writing; 
some placed all new words at the beginning of 
the lesson, some at the end, and some printed 
them in faced type ; some were for dividing words 
into syllables, others not; some gave all words 



He Laughs at Education 251 

their diacritical marks, some gave none at all; 
some used monosyllables first, and increased 
gradually to longer words, while others were 
composed on the theory that a long word was 
recognized as easily as a short one; some insisted 
on the phonetic method entirely, and some would 
none of it. 

The subject matter was selected on the basis 
of theories which varied no less. One banned 
all fairy tales, another had little else; another 
set out to inculcate morals; another aimed to set 
the child right on what, how, and why to eat; 
another was filled with edifying information 
about trades and occupations; another about the 
fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every 
living thing that moved upon the earth. Some 
used colored pictures, some used photographs; 
some had numerals at the top of the page, others 
at the bottom; some at the corners, some in the 
middle. Some conformed to the deformed spell- 
ing which was called reformed, calling attention 
in the preface to its economic advantage: a re- 



252 With the Professor 

duction of three cents per book in the cost of 
typesetting was no mean factor in the democrati- 
zation of education. 

There were more methods than Touchstone's 
degrees of the He; to nominate them in order 
would have been impossible, and almost everyone 
was to be found but the Method Direct. When 
it had first dawned on the Professor that a score 
of new devices for royal roads to learning had 
been put on the market since he himself had 
gone to school, and even since he had taught in 
the grades, his sense of guilt at having taught 
imperfectly was equaled only by the sense of 
insecurity that, for a moment, possessed itself 
of his intimidated soul. How had he learned to 
read, with the crude methods of long ago? He 
had, with some trepidation, withdrawn to his 
study with one of the second readers to see 
whether he really could read. 

The Professor suspected that the case with 
arithmetic and other subjects was the same. In 
fact, a friend of his who had attained to some 



He Laughs at Education 253 

prominence in educational circles, and who was 
getting out a new geography, had talked to the 
Professor two hours by the clock, explaining 
just why the method in his book was better cal- 
culated than that of any other known textbook 
to let geographical light into the brains of boys 
and girls — and how it was going to net him three 
hundred thousand in six months, because every 
state in the Union which was unwilling to be 
ranked as unprogressive would adopt it. 

The Professor wasn't quite sure he understood, 
but he couldn't help being a little bit excited at 
the thought of seeing geography made so much 
easier and more effective; but his enthusiasm was 
chilled for just a moment when he wondered 
how a method whose excellence his acumen 
had failed to fathom in two hours could work a 
revolution in the acquisition of learning by chil- 
dren. He remembered, however, that the acumen 
of literary professors wasn't reputed to be 
much, and let that pass. 

On the whole, after the shock of revelation 



254 With the Professor 

had passed, the Professor concluded not to be 
alarmed. Children had learned to read and write 
and cipher long before his friend's textbook was 
thought of, and he himself had known a few 
good spellers in his youth. Even he knew enough 
mathematics to enable him to calculate his defi- 
cits at the end of the long vacation. The chil- 
dren of the present generation, and of genera- 
tions to come, would continue to learn something. 
No extravagances of method could keep them 
from it, if only their teachers got time from their 
experimentation for a little instruction; for chil- 
dren recovered quickly from the ravages of edu- 
cational microbes and medicines, just as they did 
from physical sickness and surgery. If teach- 
ers enjoyed the adventurous course of experiment, 
either because of the attendant excitement or be- 
cause they confused its identity with that of 
progress, let them pursue it, and welcome. As 
between laughter and wrath, the Professor con- 
cluded that he would laugh. 

He felt much the same about discipline. There 



He Laughs at Education 255 

were certain of his acquaintances who were of 
the opinion that there was an undue amount of 
" saccharine benignity " in modern school teach- 
ing; punishments and tasks ahke were of the 
milk-and-water kind. There was to be no cor- 
poral punishment, no punishment of any kind 
in anger; children should be reasoned with, and 
taught the philosophy of doing right, and the 
spirit of fear should never be allowed to enter 
their breasts. 

Rigor now was gone to bed. 

It seemed to his friends' unpedagogic minds that 
there was too much effort to make studies " in- 
teresting," and that teachers who were not 
'' liked " by pupils — i.e., who insisted on prompt 
obedience and something like work — were in 
danger of losing their positions, or at least their 
popularity in the school and community. 

The Professor's own sense of decorum was out- 
raged a hundred times a week by the insolence of 
boys and girls in the presence of their elders, and 



256 With the Professor 

even on the street ; and there were moments when 
he thought it was all chargeable to the senti- 
mentalism of the school atmosphere. There were 
times when he would have given a great deal 
to have the right to correct children lodged in 
the hands of all citizens, as it was in ancient 
Sparta. He believed that for some children the 
only means of grace which could be employed 
was punishment which really hurt, and which was 
not delayed until day after to-morrow after 
school, when the sense of righteous and angry 
indignation had faded away, and perception of 
the moral issue had become obscured, but which 
followed wrong-doing with the suddenness of the 
lightning stroke. He was tired to death of the 
phrase " corporal punishment," and of the vapid 
and sickening silliness which would have a parent 
feel the qualms of conscience and the torments of 
remorse every time his child feared him. The 
dictionaries would soon be placing obs. after 
spanking, whipping, and all the other good old 
symbols of a serious view of life and letters. 



He Laughs at Education 257 

But the Professor couldn't charge this fault 
up to teachers as a whole. How else could they 
act in a civilization which had repudiated the 
Wise Man's recipe for the preservation of the 
child, and was pinky-white in its very conception 
of God? 

No, he would laugh at that, too. It was at 
least food for humor to observe the disparity 
between , the serious confidence displayed by 
teachers in the administration of scientific pun- 
ishment, and the snickering enjoyment of chil- 
dren who had been *' disciplined." And here 
again, he reflected, children survived a great deal 
of abuse, and the result could not be so very 
serious, after all. 

At any rate, there was the home, in which they 
could be corrected, in case of pressing need. 
Home discipline was, after all, the real source 
of all virtues. And in the last resort, life itself 
would be their disciplinarian. And as to instruc- 
tion, if the Professor were not satisfied with 
grades and kindergarten, and it came to the worst, 



258 With the Professor 

he could keep his children at home and teach 
them himself — stealing the time from his em- 
ployer the state, under the plea of making citi- 
zens — and give them in an hour as much of what 
was really fundamental as they were getting in 
six at school. From a year's experience the 
Professor thought he saw that the education of 
the ordinary family of children by parents in 
the home, after the good old Roman fashion, 
was not at all impossible, if only the father could 
set aside an hour a day from the frenzied pursuit 
of business, and the mother a like space from 
the frenzied chase of culture. As it was, how- 
ever, he feared that no seed was sown which 
Heracleidan blood might own. 

Again, and lastly, it wasn't the technical and 
professional schools that the Professor wanted 
to hold up and expose. The Professor had no 
quarrel with them. They were doing, with ad- 
mirable sincerity and vigor, what they set out 
to do, and made no pretense to anything else. The 
nation could not do without them. 



He Laughs at Education 259 

You see that there were really a number of 
things in the educational system which the Pro- 
fessor let pass without challenge; and when you 
consider, he appears a really self-contained and 
moderate being. 

He laid down his pen, reflecting that the case 
of education could not be very bad, so long as it 
could be laughed at. Anything which contributed 
to the humor of life was not wholly without ex- 
cuse for existence. 



CHAPTER IX 

A GOODLY APPLE ROTTEN AT THE 
HEART 

The Professor felt no more than ordinary dis- 
satisfaction with technical, professional, and com- 
mon school education, but he had a quarrel with 
education, nevertheless. Has anyone ever seen a 
professor who didn't? or who could say without 
blushing that he was sure his occupation was legit- 
imate? Let some psychologist, or sociologist, or 
educationist, or moralist, or muck-raker . . . 
or economist . . . determine why so few pro- 
fessors' sons adopt the calling of their fathers. 

The Professor's quarrel was with the spirit of 
higher education. So long as you conversed with 
him on any other topic, you might have supposed 
him sensible and well-balanced, though he was a 

college professor; but the moment you mentioned 

260 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 261 

the high school or the college, his essentially 
monomaniacal disposition became manifest. He 
poured forth his roarings like the waters. 

Now, of course you will think that the Pro- 
fessor's ground of complaint was that the con- 
duct of high school and collegiate education was 
unfavorable to the classics. For did not promi- 
nent educationists — there is a difference between 
educators and educationists — say that the ancient 
tongues were too hard, that they ruined the stu- 
dent's English, were impractical, wretchedly 
taught, took too much time, had no real connec- 
tion with terrestrial existence, were dead, dead, 
dead things, and after a few years would have 
to give place to something more modern, more 
vital, more measurable — and easier? 

It is true, the Professor didn't like this kind 
of talk, especially as it frequently proceeded from 
those whose attitude toward culture in general 
was like that of Goldsmith's principal toward 
Greek : '' You see me, young man; I never learned 
Greek, and I don't find that I have ever missed 



262 With the Professor 

it. I have had a doctor's cap and gown without 
Greek. I have ten thousand florins a year with- 
out Greek; I eat heartily without Greek; and, in 
short, as I don't know Greek, I do not believe 
there is any good in it." 

But the Professor saw plainly enough that the 
classics were not alone in being the object of 
attack. The friends of modern language might 
regard the ancient languages as a stumbling-block, 
and the advocates of history, pure science, and 
all other subjects which could not prove an imme- 
diate connection with life — i.e., getting on in 
business — ^might entertain the same view; but he 
knew that they were short-sighted; that the con- 
flict was not between the ancient and modern, not 
between scientific and literary culture, but be- 
tween idealism and utilitarianism. The classics 
were not being neglected and opposed because 
they were ancient, or because they were foreign, 
or because they were hurting English, or because 
they were not practical, but because they were 
not immediately practical. The classics were 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 263 

only one brigade in the army of liberal culture 
which was being assailed by the forces of the 
mediocre and the practical. Their defeat would 
be but the forerunner of the end of all serious 
literary study, which meant that all liberal cul- 
ture would be endangered; for, let men say what 
they chose, literature was as surely the indis- 
pensable element in liberal culture as power of 
thought and the conscious sense of beauty were 
what distinguished the human being from other 
animals. 

Here, then, was the Professor's real ground 
for complaint. He was an idealist. It was the 
low-thoughted care with which all liberal cul- 
ture and with which education as a whole were 
being regarded which challenged his spirit. The 
conduct of modern education was to be judged 
by its fruits, and he did not like the fruits. The 
tree was fair-seeming — the American system was 
one of the triumphs of civilization — but there was 
gathered from it many a goodly apple rotten at 
the heart. 



264 With the Professor 

He surveyed the fruits. He saw the high 
school graduating classes come bounding down 
the steps and scatter to the four winds. Many 
went directly to work — behind counters, in de- 
livery wagons, in the streets, or on the farm. 
Many went to business colleges, to schools of 
engineering, to colleges of medicine, or law, or 
agriculture. All were in a fever to get something 
done, to get to work, to earn money, and were 
impatient of anything which delayed actual 
entrance into the arena of life. It was a 
shout of liberty, not a sigh of regret, which 
was on their lips as they parted from each 
other. 

A considerable number, indeed, went on to the 
university or college. It was the same there : the 
same lack of idealism. Many of them went be- 
cause it was the proper thing and their parents 
could afford to send them, and because they 
wished to have a good time. Many went because 
they didn't know what else to do: they had got 
into the educational stream and didn't quite know 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 265 

how to get out, and were hoping to come to some 
golden island, or waiting to be cast ashore. 

The majority, however, went because of de- 
liberate calculation and conviction that it would 
increase their earning capacity. If it was a uni- 
versity they went to, it was law or engineering 
or medicine or commerce or agriculture which 
most men went in for, and there were compara- 
tively few who did not enter these special fields 
with as little work in the arts and sciences as 
could be made to satisfy the requirements. Those 
who did enter the college of arts and science 
elected work as nearly professional or technical 
as possible. Their purpose was not liberal cul- 
ture, but professional culture. Even the women 
who elected cultural subjects did so, not because 
they were primarily after culture, which neither 
they nor many of their professors understood, 
but because they were after teachers' recommend- 
ations and certificates, or because their sorority 
friends advised it, or because the instructor was 
easy, or courteous, or interesting, or unmarried. 



266 With the Professor 

All things considered, the college of arts and 
sciences was a great commercial institution. It 
was, indeed, distinguished from the other colleges 
by its dealing with the material which was re- 
garded by the average student as an element in 
culture; but so far as the treatment of that 
material was concerned, it was as professional 
as law or medicine, as utilitarian as agriculture 
or engineering. The one prominent fact was that 
the value of the college education was estimated 
not by its liberalizing influence, but by its im- 
mediate usefulness. Culture was copartner with 
commerce. 

The Professor looked farther, into the grad- 
uate school, and saw the same thing. Young 
men and women were straining after the doctor's 
degree, not because they considered that they 
were bound to develop themselves to the full 
stature of which they were by natural endowment 
capable (for the graduate school was no place 
to go for that), but because without degrees they 
could get no position. And still farther on, he 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 267 

saw these same doctors of philosophy, now be- 
come instructors, laboriously investigating and 
publishing, and attending the meetings of learned 
societies — for the most part because, without 
manifesting such activities, they feared they 
would receive no promotion. And finally, he saw 
the same instructors, now become professors, con- 
tinuing the same strenuous activities for the sake 
of " calls," and inspiring the same ideals in stu- 
dents who were to carry the gospel of education 
to the lower schools. 

All, from Alpha to Omega, had been reared 
fromx babyhood in the atmosphere of the struggle 
for SUCCESS. The Professor did not pretend 
to know what kind of instruction they had re- 
ceived in their homes, but he knew well enough 
the character of sermon and precept they had 
listened to from the lips of teachers and prin- 
cipals. He himself had heard them from the 
same source when in school, and again when he 
was out on tours of inspection. Even yet he had 
a confused idea that most of the world's rich and 



268 With the Professor 

successful men had begun in early boyhood on 
such capital as a single match, a penny, a dead 
mouse, or nothing at all but hunger and home- 
lessness and an unearthly taste for economy, 
promptness, politeness, and other unhuman vir- 
tues; and he distinctly remembered despairing 
on various occasions because he did not seem to 
himself destitute enough to develop into a suc- 
cessful man. He could still see the solemn mien 
and hear the unctuous tones of the awful figures 
as they drew the moral from the morning talk 
or tale : Be punctual, and you will succeed ! Be 
honest and faithful, and you will succeed ! Look 
out for the little things, and you will suc- 
ceed ! It pays to get an education : the edu- 
cated man succeeds — that is, he gets a good 
position, is promoted, becomes a partner in 
the firm, and finally owns the whole concern. 
Success in every case meant material pros- 
perity : 

O cives, cives, quaerenda pecunia primum est; 
Virtus post nummos ! 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 269 

Common school and high school courses alike 
had served to confirm them in the idea, and 
here they were, about to go out and be living 
examples of it to the next generation. 

How could the rising generation in high school 
and college be blamed if they were not idealists? 
Who was to set them an example? It was an 
endless chain. From the professor in the gradu- 
ate school to the principal in the grades, all were 
preaching, either by precept or example, the 
gospel of getting on in life, of sacrificing the 
ideal, which is only the practical far removed 
and glorified, to the practical, by which is meant 
only a mean and easily achieved ideal. 

And they, so perfect in their misery, 

Not once perceived their foul disfigurement. 

Now you understand, of course, that in his 
thoughts, and sometimes in what he wrote and 
spoke, the Professor — like most professors who 
are also idealists — was led by his very idealism 
to exaggerate the ills he disliked. He knew many 



270 With fche Professor 

teachers in both secondary and higher education 
who, by due steps, aspired 

To lay their just hands on that golden key- 
That opes the palace of eternity; 

whose ideal, in the words of Stevenson, was 
honor, and not fame; to be upright, not to be 
successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be 
essentially, not outwardly, respectable. He knew, 
too, that the grades were by no means without 
idealism; for both the average pupil in the grades, 
and the average teacher (who was a woman), 
were idealists by nature. 

But, after all, he stood to it that his complaint 
was justified. The common fault of the whole 
educational system — least in the grades, more 
in the high school and college, most in the uni- 
versity — was a certain dull insistence on the 
money value of education. He knew that, what- 
ever principals and superintendents and lecturers 
meant when they harped on success in life, to 
their listeners it meant financial success. He 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 271 

thought of all the demagogic talk he had heard 
about the relation of high school and college work 
to the demands of real life, and of the multiplica- 
tion of so-called practical studies. Civics had 
been reinforced by economics and other courses 
in social science, as if good citizenship depended 
more upon these subjects than upon a taste for 
inspiring literature. History had also suddenly 
become much more important; in some way it 
had come to be classed among practical subjects, 
to the surprise of no one quite so much as its 
teachers, who rather inclined to accept the defini- 
tion of the myriad-minded Dean of the Pro- 
fessor's college, who called history ** that part 
of fiction on which we all agree." 

The sciences, too, and mathematics, had got 
the name of being practical, even the pure sci- 
ences. The Professor didn't quite see how a 
knowledge of the resolution of forces would help 
a man when a brick fell on his head, or how 
the fact of having proved experimentally the law 
of gravitation could benefit a housekeeper who 



272 With the Professor 

had dropped a flatiron on her toe, or how a 
knowledge of college algebra would help a man 
pay his debts. It appeared to him that there 
was a confusion here: the study of the sciences 
had got the name of being practical merely be- 
cause it dealt with material and measurement, 
just as literature, though treated after the man- 
ner of chemistry, was regarded as a cultural 
study because its subject-matter sometimes en- 
tered into culture. 

Modern language, too, was on the list of the 
practical, though the Professor had never known 
an instructor in a foreign language to declare 
seriously that his pupils got a working commer- 
cial knowledge of it, or that his purpose was to 
give that. But these tongues were at least alive, 
and had the semblance of being practical. Did 
not commerce involve the speaking and writing 
of German and Spanish? Surely here was some- 
thing vital — something that could be converted 
into success. 

At any rate, teachers of modern' languages 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 273 

and history, economics, science, and mathematics 
who were anxious to fill up their classes could 
recommend or defend their subjects on the 
ground of practical value, and did so. The 
question " What is there in it ? " was rarely 
asked, because it was usually anticipated. Every 
subject was labeled with its guarantee of prac- 
ticality : the pure food law itself was less effective 
than the unwritten practical education law. 

Teachers of English language and literature 
made the same kind of plea, some of them be- 
cause they really conceived the value of the 
study in that way, some of them from motives 
of policy, allowing the end to justify the means. 
They enlarged upon the advantage to applicants 
for " lucrative positions " of being able to indite 
a graceful letter, to business men of possessing 
the faculty of accurate diction, to lawyers of be- 
ing able to use ornament in their speeches, to 
book agents of knowing correct theories of ex- 
position and style. 

Even teachers of the classics appealed for 



274 With the Professor 

patronage in the same way, paralleling the claims 
of modern language by pointing out the use of 
Greek and Latin to the doctor, clergyman, phar- 
macist, geologist, botanist, politician, etc., and were 
only less culpable because the ancient languages 
could not be argued for on the basis of imme- 
diate utility. 

The Professor was not so short-sighted as to 
blame his confreres. The practical atmosphere 
belonged not only to the classroom and assembly 
room; it belonged to the community at large, to 
the nation, to the times. The two reacted on 
each other. A great cry had gone up that young 
men were not getting at their life work in the 
professions early enough, and that the college 
course should be shortened, and the work in 
grades and high schools condensed — i.e., relieved 
of the burden of studies which had no imme- 
diately practical purpose. Even daily papers 
gave editorial space to agitation for mod- 
ern and vital subjects as opposed to the old- 
fashioned studies, and published letters from 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 275 

A. C. Itizen and P. R. Actical, demanding that 
cooking, and sewing, and cabinetmaking, and 
designing, and agriculture, and typewriting, and 
shorthand, and library work, and journalism, and 
mining, and blacksmithing, and shoemaking, and 
so forth, be taught in the high schools. 

The high school was the people's college, they 
said, and should equip for the duties of life. 
The Professor had heard one educationist of na- 
tional reputation say that the high school should 
teach every student a trade, and another had 
screamed out, in a magazine which paid well for 
excitement, that the high schools had too many 
books and book instructors, and that their real 
need was *' forges, carpenter's benches, draught- 
ing instruments, simple and practical labora- 
tories, and a man's gymnasium and a swimming 
school." 

In other words, the nation was enthusiastic 
over education, but didn't seem even to under- 
stand the meaning of liberal culture. The idea 
of a liberal education as a factor in an effective 



276 With the Professor 

lifelong career, or as a necessary ingredient in 
personality, had not yet become so common as 
to be unquestioned in the minds of the best col- 
lege students, to say nothing of high school pupils. 
What with the elective system and the amazing 
confusion of values which it had fostered, a cul- 
tured person might be defined as one who had a 
degree. He might be a university graduate 
rich in acquaintance with the wisdom of the ages; 
or he might be a university graduate superintend- 
ing a railway excavation, and perfectly willing 
to confess that he couldn't see the least good 
in literature and art. As for the general public, 
it entertained little question as to which was the 
better education, or was at any rate more willing 
to be taxed for the training of the latter. 

With all this the Professor had no patience. 
He was at hopeless variance with those who 
would make the high school and the college into 
machines for the grinding out of wage-earners. 
To his mind, these institutions ought to be the 
fortresses of idealism in education and in life. 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 277 

and their product a leaven of society. They 
ought to encourage young people to look forward, 
not merely to commencement, but to the culmina- 
tion of a life career; not merely to the salary to 
be drawn the year after graduation, but to the 
measure of usefulness, happiness, and fame en- 
joyed in life as a whole. They were to foster 
the idea that education contemplated the full- 
statured citizen, high-minded and of broad 
vision, not the self-confident and self-interested 
youth of twenty-two, and that to be really edu- 
cated was to build broad and deep foundations — 
broad and deep enough to admit the construction 
of palaces rather than shacks, edifices to be com- 
plete only with the term of life. The education 
they offered was to be a beginning, not a finishing 
— a beginning of such momentum as would insure 
everlasting progress. Its diploma was to be a 
passport, not a bank-note. Let the community 
and state provide, in whatever way it chose, for 
the training of its sons and daughters for the 
practical affairs of life; but let there be some 



278 With the Professor 

institutions where the dominating influence was 
the spirit of Hberal culture. 

The Professor's friends sometimes humorously- 
observed that a passport was of little avail with- 
out bank-notes, and that his ideal would defer 
overmuch the entrance of young men into the 
promised land. He was wont to reply that any 
education involved present hardship for the sake 
of future fulfilment, and that his kind differed 
only in the greater length of the former, and the 
greater glory of the latter. You might get a 
little way into the promised land on bank-notes, 
but no one ever got to the top of Oreb or of 
Sinai without the passport. 

The young men and women whose " adviser " 
the Professor was — you understand that the title 
was merely one of courtesy — couldn't see it that 
way. They smiled at his advice with as little 
disrespect as their incredulity would permit, and 
gently but firmly saw to it that he made out their 
programs according to modern ideas of what 
education should be. 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 279 

The Professor was not at all surprised. Why 
should a stripling see as far into the future as 
his experienced elders? And why should he 
listen to the advice of his elders when he had 
been bred under the influences of an educational 
system that taught him to have implicit confidence 
in his power to choose for himself? The Pro- 
fessor was hopelessly old fogy in his views re- 
garding the elective system. It seemed to him 
a spectacle for gods and men — this investiture 
of young persons in their teens with the wisdom 
and the seriousness of purpose to which most 
teachers had not yet attained; and he saw far 
less exaggeration than many of his fellows in 
the sarcastic assertion of the critic that " the 
wisdom of the ages was to be as naught com- 
pared with the inclination of a sophomore." 

The Professor himself, rejoicing as he did 
that education in university and high school was 
democratic and open to the sons of the poor as 
well as the rich, didn't believe that more than 
very scant space in their courses should be given 



28o With the Professor 

to the commonplace things of life, against which, 
in the ordinary course of events, young people 
would inevitably break their shins. He had heard 
modern educationists called the apostles of the 
commonplace. For himself, he would be an 
apostle of the ideal. Let young people in high 
school and college get in those institutions what 
they could get nowhere else; and if such an 
education was in the nature of a luxury of prepa- 
ration for life, let the state rejoice in placing 
at least one luxury within the reach of its humbler 
citizens, and not allow the ideal education to be- 
come an affair of the privately endowed institu- 
tion, accessible only to the rich. 

" To be at home in all lands and all ages; to 
count Nature a familiar acquaintance, and Art 
an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the 
appreciation of other men's work and the criti- 
cism of your own; to carry the keys of the world's 
library in your pocket, and feel its resources 
behind you in whatever you undertake; to make 
hosts of friends among the men of your own 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 281 

age who are leaders in all walks of life; to lose 
yourself in generous enthusiasms and cooperate 
with others for common ends; to learn manners 
'from students who are gentlemen, and form 
character under professors who are Christians " 
— this was the offer of the college for the best 
years of young people's lives, said one of the 
Professor's fellow-heretics; and this was also the 
Professor's idea of the purpose of a college, 
and he would have seen the same spirit inform 
the work of the high school. 

But what if young men and women in their 
wisdom would not accept the offer, and preferred 
the lower ideal? The Professor was for con- 
demning them to everlasting redemption. He 
would have them introduced to the best by com- 
pulsion, if they had too little sense to see their 
opportunities for themselves. He believed, with 
Emerson, that our chief want in life was some- 
body who should make us do what we could; 
that it was the depth at which we lived, and not 
the surface extension, that imported. He be- 



282 With the Professor 

lieved in hastening the time " when the best that 
had anywhere been in the world should be the 
property of every man born into it." 

Not that he would have had culture pursued 
as an end in itself, or would have discouraged 
definite practical aims and ambitions. Quite the 
contrary. The Professor believed in useful citi- 
zenship as strongly as any man living, and be- 
lieved that education ought to promote it; and he 
also believed in the practical. He never denied 
the reality of the Realms of Iron and Brass. He 
had traveled there himself, and recognized the 
universal industry and enterprise of their subjects. 
They formed no mean part of the Realm Uni- 
versal which included all men and all states. 

But his ideas of what constituted the practical, 
both for the individual and the state, differed 
from those which seemed to be prevalent. To 
his mind the practical was not the immediately 
practical, but the remotely practical which men 
of the utilitarian school condemned by calling 
it ideal. He believed that the kind of citizen 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 283 

of which society stood most in need was not the 
narrow speciaHst, nor the ill-balanced business 
man, nor the frothy politician who was called 
a statesman, nor the man who was able merely 
to earn a discontented living; but the four-square 
man with extensive outlook and broad sympathies, 
who saw with the eye of understanding, and 
who was '' a radiating focus of good will . . . 
and practically demonstrated the great Theorem 
of the Livableness of life." He thought it prac- 
tical for the state to have artists and authors 
and scholars and accomplished gentlemen, as well 
as agriculturists and engineers and law3^ers, hew- 
ers and drawers, diggers in vineyards, and mighty 
makers of money before the Lord. 

The universal economy was not complete with 
mere Iron and Brass. What constituted a state? 
he asked. A voice from the Realms of Gold an- 
swered : 

Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, 

Thick wall or moated gate; 
Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned ; 

Not bays and broad-armed ports. . . 



284 With the Professor 

No: it was men, high-minded men — men who 
from experience had learned to distinguish one 
metal from another, and the false from the true. 
And High-mindedness was the mark of those 
who traveled much in the Realms of Gold. That 
was their exceeding rich reward — theirs, and that 
of the Realm Universal. 

And besides, the Professor never forgot that 
the great modern utilitarian discoveries in science 
had all been preceded by the study of pure science, 
which had been pursued for the sake of mere 
delight in learning, and that the delight in learn- 
ing had been inspired by the literature and art 
which had survived from the ancient world. 
Men had sought first the heavenly kingdom of 
learning and its righteousness, and all things had 
been added unto them. The nations of the earth 
had often entertained useful citizens unawares in 
the persons of impractical idealists. Let his own 
state not forget the lesson. 

Now that you know the full measure of the 
Professor's idealism, you will understand why 



A Goodly Apple Rotten 285 

it was that when he considered the spirit of 
modern education his thoughts so often reverted 
to that room " where was a man that could look 
no way but downward, with a muck-rake in his 
hand. There stood also one over his head with 
a celestial crown in his hand, and proffered him 
that crown for his muck-rake; but the man did 
neither look up nor regard, but raked to himself 
the straws, the small sticks, and dust of the 
floor." 

Then said the Professor : O deliver us from this 
muck-rake! But that prayer, his consciousness 
told him, had lain by till it was almost rusty. 
" Give me not riches," he knew was scarce the 
prayer of one in ten thousand. Straws and sticks 
and dust, with most, were the great things now 
looked after. 

If I had leisure, I would defend the Professor 
from the charge which I know you have already 
formulated, by demonstrating again that many 
persons are slanderously called pessimists when 
they are only idealists. But for the present it 



286 With the Professor 

must suffice to say that if you think the Pro- 
fessor's vision was distorted, it may be because 
you are of the complacent sort who derive com- 
fort from looking back at the rival who is behind 
them in the race. The Professor was of an 
older fashion, one of the kind whose gaze is fixed 
on the chariots ahead of them : 

Instat equis auriga suos vincentibus, ilium 
Praeteritum temnens extremes inter euntem. 



CHAPTER X 

THE PROFESSOR MISSES THE SERMON 

The Professor's thoughts were straying again, 
and he realized that when he got home he was 
going to add one more to the already long list 
of failures to give his wife an intelligent account 
of the sermon over the dinner table. 

Not that the Professor was wilfully inattentive, 
nor that he was in the least inclined toward ir- 
reverence. Quite the contrary: he was really 
a worshiper. When he went to church Sunday 
morning, it was because his soul thirsted for the 
living God, and he was genuinely desirous of 
communion with his Creator. 

But however excellent the sermon, and however 

great the good-will he brought to it, he was 

not always master enough of himself to follow 

it to the end. His thoughts would wander. It 

was so easy for a fragmentary thought from the 
287 



288 With the Professor 

pulpit to lodge in his mind and jog his mental 
machinery into pernicious activity. Or some 
chance circumstance in his environment, or senti- 
ment in the hymn, afforded a fruitful suggestion, 
and before he knew it, all his good resolutions 
had gone for naught, and he was oblivious of 
preacher and congregation, busily employed in 
pursuing — or rather following — a train of 
thought all his own. 

Perhaps it was due to the season — It was 
the week after Easter, and you know what the 
Easter season means at church — but this par- 
ticular morning the Professor's thoughts were 
even more vagrant than usual. Circumstance and 
sermon alike — the text was Isaiah iii. 12: And 
women rule over them — seemed to have conspired 
to make him guilty of flagrant inattention. The 
eternal feminine — his thoughts would be induced 
to consider nothing else, and insisted in going 
about it in their own way. 

As he had taken his place, he had been re- 
minded of the long ago vy^hen he used to creep 



He Misses the Sermon 289 

into and submerge his small self among waving 
grain and grass, or tall poppies. Pulpit, choir, 
and congregation alike were screened from his 
vision; everything but the ceiling. When he 
leaned forward to get his hymnal, paper blos- 
soms and creepers tickled his nose; when he re- 
clined again, his back hair was ruffled by other 
specimens of horticultural ingenuity; and only 
by maintaining the strictest equilibrium could he 
keep clear of incumbrance to right and left. 

He tried to look about him. When he had 
first taken his seat, it was difficult enough; but 
by the time the sermon began, it was almost 
hopeless. He ought to have known that Easter 
hats, like German professors, took advantage of 
the Akademisches Viertel. Nevertheless, by dint 
of judicious craning, he managed after a while 
to get his vision through the testudo-like forma- 
tion of the prevailing style of headdress, and to 
see a lone man four seats ahead, sitting with 
shoulders contracted and head slightly drooping, 
circumspect and apologetic. One or two others 



290 With the Professor 

he saw to right and left, in the same attitude 
and trying to look unconcerned; but it was safe to 
say that nine out of ten persons present were 
women and girls. 

The Professor reflected that what was true of 
his own congregation was true also of congrega- 
tions elsewhere. To be sure, he had heard fabu- 
lous tales about the number of men some- 
times seen at church; but as for himself, he 
had never been able to count more than one man to 
two women. He remembered the prominent part 
played by women in the Epistles, and in early 
Christian times in general, and reflected that 
much the same proportion must have been true 
of the early Christian congregations. Whatever 
might be said to the contrary, he could not escape 
the conclusion that, so far as formal worship was 
concerned, religion was a feminine thing. 

But that was not all. Not only were six out 
of seven of the average congregation women, 
but even the male remnant was less masculine 
in quality than the ordinary male member of 



He Misses the Sermon 291 

society. The Professor looked at the few speci- 
mens visible to him, and scrutinized himself as 
well. Had they not all pale and smooth skins, 
soft and delicate hands, gentle and unobtru- 
sive ways? He looked in vain for the coarse, 
bronzed, weatherbeaten faces of the children of 
toil and hardship, or even of the sturdier animal 
types among other classes. 

In the country where he had been brought up 
it had been the same : the gray-haired fathers in 
Israel had not been the vigorous red-blooded types 
of the community, filled with strong impulse 
and appetite, but the mild and quiet sort. Good 
men they were, and above reproach. The Pro- 
fessor would never have thought of calling them 
effeminate, nor did he think of his present fellow- 
worshipers as effeminate. He wished all men 
were more like themx — gentle and considerate, un- 
assuming, patient, charitable, of noble aspirations; 
but still they were in character more like good 
women than like the average man of the com- 
munity. 



292i With the Professor 

The Professor's thoughts next turned to the 
preachers he had listened to. He could remember 
few of them who were vigorous masculine types. 
Their virtues, as a rule, were many: they were 
pure, noble, and self-sacrificing, and the breath 
of criticism was stopped before them. Yet how 
many of them he had heard referred to as effem- 
inate! In some cases, to be sure, the Professor 
thought the employment of the word justified, 
and would indeed have preferred the charge him- 
self. If the term was not meant for men who 
were slight and delicate, smooth-shaven and soft- 
skinned, with cultivated grace of hand and wrist, 
and with mincing step, who were dressed in 
gownlike coats, gleaming linen, and white tie, 
exhaled faint perfumes, wore wisps of hair care- 
fully arranged over the forehead, mingled tears 
and honey in their voices, addressed omnipotent 
God as ^'dear," *^ sweet," "loving," and filled 
their sermons with diction of the same character 
— for whom, in the name of Adam, thought the 
Professor with some impatience, was it designed ? 



He Misses the Sermon 293 

But the Charles Honeymans were exceptions, and 
rare. To their saner and more perfectly poised 
brethren he never would have thought of applying 
the term. 

In some churches, too, the Professor reflected, 
there was similarity between the vesture of 
women and that of ministrant. He thought of 
surpliced choirs, of the laced robes of priest and 
acolyte, of the monkish costume, of rich altar 
appointment, of all the attention paid to detail 
in the adornment of sanctuary and ceremonial. 
Surely here again was manifest the spirit of the 
eternal feminine. 

Yes . . . but what of it, after all? Was 
he to think of it as a reproach to religion that 
its followers were characterized, on the whole, 
more by feminine than by masculine qualities? 
He knew that many did, and that they felt a shade 
of contempt for the church. Was there really 
something wrong about it? or was it rather all 
right, and as it was intended by the Great Intel- 
ligence ? 



294 With the Professor 

The Professor's logic set itself to work — or 
rather went off on a Httle tour to see what it 
might find for its recreation. Yes, much in the 
outward form of rehgion was feminine; and the 
same was true of its content. The virtues taught 
by rehgion were those naturally belonging to 
women rather than to men. Religion was essen- 
tially a feminine thing. Pastors, other things be- 
ing equal, were more religious than laymen, and 
more virtuous; and also more feminine. Laymen, 
other things being equal, were more religious 
than non-church-members, and more virtuous; 
and also more feminine. The greater the prog- 
ress of human society, then, the nearer its ap- 
proach to the feminine. Ergo, when the mil- 
lennium should arrive, it would see all human 
beings feminized. 

The Professor was somewhat taken aback by 
the conclusion to which his logic so swiftly led 
him, and was at first disposed to protest. He 
reflected, however, that to be feminized meant 
neither to be resexed, nor unsexed, nor neces- 



He Misses the Sermon 295 

sarily to be made effeminate, and felt reassured; 
to be feminine was one thing, to be effeminate 
quite another. One was a virtue, the other a 
defect. For all mankind to become gentle, lov- 
ing, and self-sacrificing, to rid itself of the stains 
of sordid ambition and to stand forth clad in the 
shining garments of charity and purity — was 
surely nothing to dread. Did not indeed his own 
daily prayer include an earnest petition that he 
might possess these very virtues? 

But was the basis of his logic right? Was 
it really true that religion was essentially feminine 
in character? The Professor thought of the 
poetry and art which clung to religion: of the 
elaborate ceremonial of ritualistic churches, of 
the hardly less effort of his own church to secure 
the effect of ritual without laying itself open 
to the charge of employing it. He thought of 
the music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and 
poetry which had come into being in response 
to the impulse of religion, whether from within 
or from without. 



296 With the Professor 

All these things, it was true, might be only 
the husk of religion; but the kernel itself was 
poetry, too. Did not the essentially poetic qual- 
ity of religion manifest itself in a score of ways 
— in the diction of sermon and prayer, in the 
form and content of hymns, in the processional 
and the Communion, in all the symbols employed 
to manifest Deity to the sense, in the mystic 
sentiment of the worshiper, in his loyalty to the 
ideal and the unseen, in his repudiation of the 
visible and practical? To be sure, he had heard 
preachers declare that religion w^as the most log- 
ical and reasonable thing in the world; but he 
knew, and knew that they knew, that as logic and 
reason are ordinarily conceived of, they had little 
to do with religion, which was concerned with 
faith, or, in other words, was more a matter of 
temperament than of intellect. The conclusion of 
the philosopher that " religion was poetry become 
the guide of life" seemed to him a good one, 
if rightly understood. 

Yes, religion was essentially poetic — ^poetic in 



He Misses the Sermon 297 

content, and poetic in expression. Its content 
had to do with the ideal, and overrode logic and 
reality; and its forms of expression were the 
products of the esthetic instinct. And poetry and 
art were feminine rather than masculine in qual- 
ity. Were not the Mediterranean nations, espe- 
cially Greece and the Latin countries, often spoken 
of as representing the feminine in civilization? 
Their fame was based rather on sculpture, paint- 
ing, architecture, and literature than on their 
achievements in grim-visaged war and the science 
of the purely practical. The same nations were 
the most faithful daughters of religion. The 
essentially feminine qualities in them which had 
impelled them to develop art and poetry and re- 
ligion kept them in an appreciative attitude to- 
ward the products of their genius. 

So art and poetry were closely allied to religion, 
and ail were indwelt by the same spirit — the 
spirit of the feminine. Women rather than men 
liked them, and fostered them. It might be that 
men were often the makers and innovators, but 



298 With the Professor 

the product was feminine, after all. The mascu- 
line spirit might contribute the energy and the 
logic necessary to execution; but it was the fem- 
inine spirit which gave the poet and the artist 
the intuitive perception which was the really in- 
dispensable element in artistic creation; they them- 
selves were little more than instruments. Had 
not a famous anthropologist mistaken the skull 
of Raphael for that of a woman? "Gentle" 
Virgil, " gentle " Sophocles, " gentle " and 
*' sweetest " Shakespeare, " fancy's child " — were 
not poets best remembered for qualities usually 
possessed by women? Had not Milton been 
called the lady of Christ's? The friendships of 
poets and artists, too — were not friendships with 
women prominent among them ? How many col- 
lections of letters by literary men had the Pro- 
fessor seen, among which the most attractive com- 
positions were addressed to women ! 

Culture in general, too, was feminine. Men 
were essentially but brutes engaged in the unpoetic 
practicalities of life which centered about the 



He Misses the Sermon 299 

struggle for existence; while women, much less 
enthralled by the selfish passions begotten in the 
struggle, were cultivating the finer perceptions. 
The Professor thought of the college of his town. 
Remove from it the students of the liberal arts, 
especially literature and the languages, and you 
removed from it all the women, but few men. 
There were twenty women to five men in every 
subject avowedly cultural; while the so-called 
practical subjects were elected by men only. Nor 
was it interest only that prompted the election; 
their tastes also were for the practical. 

Then the Professor's thoughts passed by easy 
transition to the larger College of Life — the com- 
munity round about him. Men belonged to the 
Elks, the Masons, the Woodmen, etc., and em- 
ployed their leisure moments in meeting to smoke 
and drink together, tell stories, and play cards 
or billiards. Women spent their spare moments 
— and many which they could not spare — in 
Women's Clubs, Art Associations, or in laborious 
fancy-work; and when they adopted a profession, 



300 With the Professor 

it was usually teaching. There were nine women 
to every man on the instructional forces of the 
primary and secondary schools of the Professor's 
city. 

There was a great deal of talk about segrega- 
tion of the sexes in education (you may know 
by this that the Professor did not live in the 
East) ; but what the Professor saw was segre- 
gation already, in reality. College men and 
women chose few studies in common; the effect 
of coeducation was social rather than intel- 
lectual. But the tendency toward segregation 
was not limited to education alone. Men were 
becoming more and more immersed in the prac- 
tical, and were less and less attracted by the 
cultural phases of life. Women were gravitating 
the other way, and with a greater rapidity than 
ever before in history. For until comparatively 
recent times the tendency toward separation had 
been held in check by woman's lack of freedom; 
but now that womankind was emancipated, with 
the privileges of the world open to it, and en- 



He Misses the Sermon 301 

couragement was added to opportunity, what was 
to be the result? 

The Professor again became a prey to alarm. 
Here were church and college contributing to 
an ever widening breach between the sexes. 
Whether men were less inclined toward culture 
and religion or not, women were surely progress- 
ing more rapidly in both than ever before. The 
feminine part of society was studying cultural 
subjects in college, and in church was listening 
to exhortations on the feminine virtues; the mas- 
culine element was going to schools of commerce 
and engineering and law on week-days, and any- 
where else than to church on Sundays; whereas 
if society was not to be disrupted, men ought 
to be studying literature and art and listening to 
sermons on lovingkindness and spirituality, and 
women ought to be mingling in the current of 
practical life and acquiring the masculine virtues 
(if there were any such: the Professor was sure 
he had none). 

He had an inspiration. Why not reverse the 



302 With the Professor 

order of things, and lessen the breach? Why 
not cheat segregation of its prey by turning the 
tables on it, and having female congregations 
listen to sermons on self-reliance, fortitude, and 
honor, and forcing men to sit under exhortations 
to tenderness, charity, mercy, lovingkindness, 
self-denial, etc.? Why not put women to school 
to learn business and engineering, and men to 
learn art, literature, domestic science, and fancy- 
work? As it was, only those who were whole 
were under the care of the physician; while they 
that were sick were growing worse and worse. 
By encouraging on the one hand hardihood and 
vigor and animal selfishness a little, and on the 
other hand the softer virtues, women might be 
made more mascuhne and men more feminine, 
and the sexes be got together, unity preserved, 
and race suicide averted. 

But the Professor's instinct told him imme- 
diately that this would never do. You couldn't 
drive out Nature with a pitchfork in that way. 
Affairs would have to go on in the old manner. 



He Misses the Sermon 303 

He knew enough about the processes of civiHza- 
tion to reahze that it wouldn't do to worry over- 
much about ways of hastening them, or of hin- 
dering them. 

And besides, what sense in trying to hinder 
civiHzation in this case? The Professor's logic 
asked the privilege of another trial. For civiliza- 
tion really meant the only progress worth while — 
unless all human effort was being misplaced, and 
all human theory was wrong, and everyone was 
pursuing false ideals; and that was unthinkable. 
If history meant anything, it was that civilization 
was forward-marching : 

The thoughts of men were widened with the process 
of the suns. 

Furthermore, it was equally certain that civiliza- 
tion meant the growth of the virtues: and the 
virtues were feminine. It might be that many 
conceived of railroad engines, ocean liners, sky- 
scrapers, dynamos, and airships as the standard 
by which to measure the progress of civilization; 



304 With the Professor 

but the Professor knew better. He knew that 
civihzation was to be measured rather by the 
degree of safety, happiness, and refined enjoy- 
ment of which the individual was assured. There 
was one thing by which above all others progress 
was to be measured — virtue — and this was in- 
timately connected with religion and poetry and 
art, all of which were concerned with the ideal 
rather than the real, with the feminine rather 
than the masculine. 

In other words, the advance of civilization 
meant the advance of idealism — that is, the ad- 
vance of the illogical and the impractical, which 
men agreed were feminine qualities. For what 
virtue was either logical or practical? What 
logic or practicality was there in a strong man's 
being merciful to a weak man in his power? or 
in keeping his hands from that which was not 
his own? or in obeying the dictates of that won- 
derful product of civilization, the conscience? 
The virtues were anything but practical; they 
were always interfering with success, Conscience 



He Misses the Sermon 305 

was forever making cowards of those who might 
be wealthy or powerful, did they not heed it. 

And still, here were the virtues, in actual ex- 
istence, a growth of Nature, flowers strangely 
sprung from the soil of barbarism, a triumph 
of the impractical over the practical ! When all 
was said and done, it was neither conquest nor 
commerce which constituted the claim of the na- 
tions to honorable mention in history — but the 
fostering of religion, the production of Homers 
and Shakespeares and Tennysons, the erection of 
Parthenons, the painting of pictures, the carving 
of statues. 

So if civilization meant religion and the arts, 
and religion and the arts were essentially fem- 
inine, and the march of progress meant the femi- 
nizing of society, the Professor was, after all, pre- 
pared to look upon the tendencies of his time with 
a fair degree of faith and equanimity. It was 
the way of Nature, and he would abide by it. 

He did indeed feel some slight anxiety concern- 
ing the gravitation of the sexes away from each 



3d6 With the Professor 

other; but even this disappeared after more ma- 
ture consideration. For neither were sermon and 
lecture so fruitful that all who heard them were 
transformed into children of light, nor were the 
benefits of culture or the deep things of God 
limited to those only who attended church and 
received university degrees. 

But even were all women, instead of compara- 
tively few, rapidly becoming cultured and spirit- 
ualized, and even were a still greater number of 
men neglecting to avail themselves of the oppor- 
tunities of college and church, the Professor felt 
no apprehension as to the final event; for he re- 
flected that ever since Adam followed the mother 
of mankind to the forbidden tree, and Orpheus 
descended to hell for Eurydice, the one principle 
which was as constant as the northern star, 

Of whose true-fixed and resting quality 
There was no fellow in the firmament, 

was that wherever women went men were at some 
time sure to follow. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE PROFESSOR SPENDS AN 
EVENING OUT 

"Coming!" the Professor's wife called down 
over the banisters. *' Watch for the next car ! 
All ready now except my waist, my diamond 
necklace, my aigrette, furs, coat, and rubbers. 
Do you think we'll need an umbrella? . . . 
Oh dear, these hooks ! '* 

The Professor sat waiting in the parlor — a. 
pleasant room, with Persian rugs, rosewood grand 
piano, antique furniture, genuine Renaissance 
paintings, the great novelists in sheep, and all 
the other ornamental appurtenances of the aver- 
age college professor whose textbook has been 
vigorously pushed in the secondary schools, and 
who has fortified himself against the charge of 

total insensibility to the practical by marrying the 
307 



3o8 With the Professor 

only daughter of a respectable captain of finance 
— ^that is to say, one who is guilty, in the phrase 
of a sociological friend of the Professor's, of 
smokeless sin only. 

The Professor had been waiting for some time, 
as was apparent from both his attitude and his 
costume. His overcoat was buttoned close, he 
wore gloves and a silk hat, and his chin was sunk 
into his breast. 

He was clad in evening costume — patent 
leathers, swallowtail, white vest, dress shirt with 
pearl studs, standing collar, hand-tied bow, and 
no jewelry except an ornament on his fob in- 
scribed ^BK — which means Philosophy, the 
Guide of Life, whatever conclusions you may 
have drawn from the course in life taken by 
those who wear it. 

The Professor was correctly dressed. What 
is more, he was reposefully conscious of it. How 
this was possible, you will understand when I tell 
you that he had several years before learned a 
number of recipes for dressing, from a handbook 



An Evening Out 309 

which he kept on his dressing-table through two 
whole social seasons, much after the manner of 
the young college-bred housewife who keeps her 
cookbook at hand during the first years of real 
domestic science. By dint of close study of the 
Book, and constant application of its principles 
during two years of feverish social activity, he 
had become so proficient in the art of The Cor- 
rect Thing in Dress that costume was now merely 
a matter of mechanics to him, and no longer taxed 
his wife's intellect in any but the slightest degree. 
His own it taxed not at all. Was it afternoon 
tea? His hand reached out after the frock coat, 
tinted tie, and top hat, with the accuracy of a 
type-setter at his case. Was it a formal dinner 
or a reception? Behold him with the clawham- 
mer, standing collar, white tie, and pearl studs 
above described. Was it a dinner for men 
only? With the same unerring precision the 
clawhammer gave way to the tuxedo, the pearl 
studs to gold, the standing collar to the turn- 
down, the white tie to the black. Whether the 



3IO With the Professor 

function was for the evening or afternoon, 
^^whether it was a dinner or a luncheon, a boating 
party or a golf game or an auto excursion, a 
picnic or a theater party or a circus, or any other 
of the countless and ingenious devices of college 
men to kill time, whether it was formal or in- 
formal, with or without ladies, summer or winter, 
sacred or profane, professional or otherwise, he 
never had to hesitate. The Book had become a 
habit with him. He never had to plan a costume. 
He had merely to assemble and put it on. And 
assembling was a matter of few moments and 
little trouble. At the sound of the Professor's 
tuneful voice (figuratively, of course), the jarring 
atoms of his wardrobe sprang together into heav- 
enly harmony with the readiness of the elements 
in the universal frame of Nature: 

Then hot and cold and moist and dry 
In order to their stations leap, 
And Music's power obey. 

It will occur to you, of course, that this kind 
of dressing is not Art, And of course it isn't. 



An Evening Out 311 

The Book might better have been called The 
Technique of Dress than The Art of Dress. If 
the dress of women, with all its opportunity to 
be independent and original, is nevertheless 
largely in slavery to the fashions — which are set 
either by society queens who are dying of ennui 
and have to be revived by something new, or by 
hard-featured, money-wise merchants who create 
this year's demand by destroying last year's sup- 
ply, or rendering it useless — who can expect art 
to have anything to do with masculine attire? 
No, art in the dress of men is in these business- 
like, convenient, democratic days to be seen only 
in statuary and on the stage, where indeed it is 
only a relic of the art of a bygone age. 

It will occur to you, too, that the Professor 
seems to have spent considerable time in social 
experiment, considering that during those Hand- 
book days he was in his first years of service, and 
hoping for promotion. But you are not in the 
secrets of the profession. A recently created — or 
ordained — or forced — or incubated — doctor of 



312 With the Professor 

philosophy has so many valuable notebooks, and 
so much confidence in himself and in them, that 
he is in a much better position to instruct without 
severe application than older men who have begun 
to suspect the real nature of graduate instruction 
and notebook knowledge, and have come under 
the spell of the conscience that makes cowards 
of even braver men than college professors. 
Whether he spends his time in preparing for 
recitations and lectures, or in saying pretty things 
at pink teas, doesn't really make so much differ- 
ence to his classes, who, after all, in these days 
of youthful and scientific instruction, have got 
into the way of enjoying dead notes much jnore 
than living ideas. Ideas are so unmathematical, 
unscientific, and unmanageable — always in need 
of attention, like plants: watering, fertilizing, 
pruning, tying, grafting, transplanting, re-arrang- 
ing. Imitation flowers are much less bothersome : 
which will classify, stay where you put them, and 
always be at hand when you need them. And as 
for aroma, who cares for that, anyway ? Every- 



An Evening Out 313 

one knows that the sense of smell is only a prod- 
uct of evolution, and never would have been devel- 
oped at all if we had only had pure food in- 
spectors from the first. And in that case a glass 
flower without perfume would have been just as 
good as a rose, wouldn't it? Are we going to 
insist on aroma just because we have noses? 

And as for promotion, everybody knows that it 
depends upon the good will of the department 
head and the dean and the president, which is 
conditioned on what the social leaders say of the 
candidate, which in turn depends upon whether 
he dresses properly and says in fitting fashion the 
things — or nothings — ^prescribed by the Book. 
Once in a great while, of course — and perhaps 
oftener — you come upon a dean or a president 
who will not promote on the mere ground of 
good looks and social accomplishment, and insists 
on brains, industry, and a measure of common 
sense; but ordinarily, you understand, it is taken 
for granted that the inner man is well furnished, 
if only the candidate hath a goodly outside. To 



314 With the Professor 

be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; 
but to read and write comes by nature. For 
your favor, young instructor, why, give God 
thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your 
writing and reading, let that appear when there 
is no need of such vanity. 

At eight- forty-five the Professor's social ally 
came downstairs, all in a flurry, and all ready — 
she said. By nine o'clock she had on her coat 
and furs, and at nine-fifteen had her hat properly 
adjusted. At nine-twenty they boarded a car, 
and at nine-fifty were coming downstairs in the 
home of the host and hostess of the evening. It 
took them ten minutes to reach the head of the 
receiving line, and ten minutes to shake hands — 
with elevated elbow and down-pointed digits — 
with the dozen dignitaries who composed it. 
Then fifteen minutes of peripatetic gesticulation 
and conversation as they gravitated in the direc- 
tion of the dining-room, where they stood ten 
minutes in a crowded corner consuming a quick 
lunch of lettuce- and ham-sandwiches, nuts and 



An Evening Out 315 

olives, red-white-and-apple-green ice-cream, and 
black coffee. Then two minutes in another room 
before a lemonade and candy stand which ought 
to have been licensed — and then another circum- 
spect hand-shake, a suspiciously enthusiastic 
*' such a delightful time ! " and a final struggle 
upstairs to the dressing-rooms again. 

The Professor and his wife reached home at 
eleven-thirty. Between them, counting in the 
dressing, which had begun at four-thirty with the 
one, and seven forty-five with the other, they had 
consumed ten and three-quarters hours. This, 
you understand, does not take into account the 
time they would spend in getting to sleep; or 
the extra hours they would waste next morning 
in the attempt to make up for the evening; or 
their expenditure of energy; or the damage their 
self-respect had suffered by reason of all the 
polite and agreeable things they had said to their 
fellow-men while under the pressure of polite 
social environment that evening, and would suffer 
by reason of all the impolite and disagreeable 



3i6 With the Professor 

things they would say to each other next day 
under the spur of incipient nervous prostra- 
tion. 

To set in the credit column they had the sense 
of duty well done, the satisfaction of knowing 
that exactly the same thing would not recur for 
a very long time, a rather heavy supper of which 
they had not been in the least need — and some 
ten minutes of real sociability. For, to tell the 
truth, they had fallen in with, in those crowded 
rooms, three or four persons whom they really 
knew and really liked, and had " met " one or 
two more whom they thought they might like if 
they could ever associate with them under less 
distracting circumstances — though neither of 
them could recollect ever having begun lasting 
friendships in this way. 

The Professor had made the above calculation 
while engaged in distributing his type — by which 
of course I mean the vestimental paraphernalia 
of the evening. Vestimental may not be in the 
lexicon, but we must have some word, and gar- 



An Evening Out 317 

bage will hardly do, being already in a more 
useful service. 

After everything was hanging in Its proper place, 
he stepped to his desk and put his figures down 
on paper, and then came In where Mrs. Professor 
was distributing her type, and waved the paper 
in her face, at the same time giving vocal ex- 
pression to his results. " Are you sure you have 
added right ? " were her first words. She had 
learned never to trust the statistics of a literary 
professor — which is only not quite so bad as trust- 
ing the literature of a statistical professor. 

He submitted the sum, which she audited, veri- 
fied, and approved. " It does seem as if we had 
put a great deal of time and energy into something 
which had brought us comparatively little, doesn't 
it? I suppose we really went for the sake of 
socIablHty, didn't we ? " 

The Professor sat down on the edge of the 
bed. *' At least that's what everybody says these 
things are for," he replied. '' But sometimes I 
have my doubts. At any rate, if society Isn't 



3i8 With the Professor 

for the sake of our knowing and liking each other 
better, what is it for? . . . Unless it is for 
the purpose of giving a few people the privilege 
of climbing to distinction on the backs of a suffer- 
ing and unsuspicious multitude who are blindly 
seeking after something they do not understand. 
. . . But I am not willing to concede that I 
went this evening for that . . /' He sat 
a while longer. 

Presently he arose and went up on to his Roof- 
Garden. '' I can't get to sleep after such an 
evening as this! Don't you remember the last 
time? I'm going up on to the roof, among my 
friends." 

It was calm and quiet and restful up there, 
and invited meditation. It is true, there were 
lots of people there, but they were not talking, or 
at least, if they were, it was in the still small 
voice. Their theory of communication was like 
Hawthorne's : speech was intended for the use of 
people who could converse in no other way. 

I see that you are wondering. Of course it 



An Evening Out 319 

was not a really and truly Roof-Garden. It was 
only the Professor's quiet, secluded, well-worn 
little study. And as for the people I mentioned, 
they were the friendly books among which he sat, 
and had sat for years. They were not books of 
Special Learning, but books by the great General 
Practitioners of Life — ^poets, novelists, essayists, 
historians. They, too, were well worn — but this 
is just as much a virtue in your books as in 
human society. You enjoy your real friends best 
when they come to you in familiar attire — neat- 
but-not-gaudy, and not bescented, bedizened, and 
bold, looking like roues, or courtesans, or the 
six best sellers. 

And I may as well tell you right now, too, 
that what you read a few pages back about dia- 
monds and rosewood and Persian rugs was all 
a fiction. The Professor was not rich as this 
world judges wealth. That was meant merely as 
a bit of humor; for really, there could be nothing 
more humorous in all this world than a rich col- 
lege professor. 



320 With the Professor 

That other, too, was a fiction — about his social 
achievements, and the manner of his promotion. 
The fact is, his chair was in a college where you 
really had to be learned; and, further, you had to 
prove it by writing and publishing something so 
deep, or so high, or so far away, or so thin, or 
so dazzling, or so impalpable, or so unheard of, 
that no one could prove that it was not learned. 
And as for polite society, the social column of 
the Morning Hoo Hoo never heralded in con- 
nection with his name '' the delightful so- 
cial function attended by fully six hundred 
guests, many of them from out of town," and 
the '' pretty lilac luncheon, with covers laid for 
ten." 

Now you must not think the Professor a non- 
conformist, or a misanthrope, or a misogynist, or 
a nihilist, or an anarchist, or a sansculottist. He 
was really a very moderately disposed person, 
as you shall see, and believed that breeches ought 
to be ornamental as well as useful. 

It is true, he had once or twice in his career 



An Evening Out 321 

injudiciously given way under extreme provo- 
cation, and employed harsh words. Sometimes 
when he went out to an afternoon reception, and 
the occasion was not one of the few fortunate 
accidents of his experience, he was tempted to 
describe these functions in general in the words 
of the witty alliterator: " Gabble, giggle, gobble, 
git!'' 

Once, too, he had failed to frown properly 
at a sinful story narrated by an iconoclastic 
friend. For thirty minutes this friend had strug- 
gled through the crowd at a reception, screaming 
to everyone he met : " A continual dropping in 
a very rainy day and a contentious woman are 
alike," and had received at each repetition the 
almost unvaried formula : " Indeed ! How charm- 
ing! It is rather dry. How perfectly fascinat- 
ing Have you met Miss Bumbumburrum- 

bum? " And on their arrival home, his wife had 
told him, with pleasure in her eyes, that she had 
a beautiful compliment for him: Mrs. Patricia 
Trinominate Orobrique had said to her : " What 



322 With the Professor 

a perfectly interesting husband you have ! Such 
an addition to our set ! " 

The time had been, too, when the Professor 
thought Hghtly of the sincerity of some society 
people, and had drawn back at the prospect of 
his growing accustomed to employ the English 
language with so little regard for what it meant. 
He had never expected to shine in society. Quid 
faciam Romaef Mentiri nescio — what was he 
to do at Rome? He didn't know how to lie. 
Whatever his parents had taught him or failed 
to teach him, one thing they had impressed on 
him: that he must tell the truth, or tell nothing. 
It had cost him endless trouble. He simply 
couldn't help it: he would blush when he lied, 
even if he was doing it to please someone, 
and had every assurance that it was perfectly 
proper. 

Through patience and perseverance, however, 
he had gradually gotten over this as well as other 
unreasonable prejudices, and could at the bidding 
of necessity, or even of expediency, receive and 



An Evening Out 323 

give like other people the counterfeit coin of 
society. Counterfeit? Yes, counterfeit. And 
yet, not counterfeit; for those who dealt in it 
declared that everybody knew that it was counter- 
feit, and that it deceived nobody, and did no 
harm, and that therefore it was after all not coun- 
terfeit. It wouldn't do to tell the truth all the 
time. Truth was sometimes unpleasant, and 
smelled to heaven. A drawing-room was no 
place for that sort of thing. Hadn't the Preacher 
said that Pleasant words were as an honeycomb, 
sweet to the soul, and health to the bones ? You 
must have some regard for the amenities. That 
was as plain as a pikestaff. 

It is true, the Professor sometimes had his 
doubts. He thought he saw that many people 
were duped — as well those who tried to pass the 
counterfeit and thought they had succeeded, as 
those who really received it at its apparent value. 
Even the more astute, too, he thought he saw, 
gladly received the counterfeit when they knew it 
was counterfeit. '' How is it," asked Thackeray, 



324 With the Professor 

" that we allow ourselves, not to be deceived, but 
to be ingratiated so readily by a glib tongue, a 
ready laugh, and a frank manner ? We know, for 
the most part, that it is false coin, and we take 
it; we know that it is flattery, which it costs 
nothing to distribute to everybody, and we had 
rather have it than be without it." The Professor 
thought he could answer the novelist — it was 
because men were led on by the secret and 
half unconscious hope that somehow or other 
the glittering pieces would ring true, or at least 
that other people would think them genuine. 

And there were many, too, who from continued 
abuse had lost their keenness of vision, and their 
delicate sense of touch and weight, and could no 
longer distinguish the true from the false; and 
there were many more who didn't stop to ex- 
amine, and accepted all as genuine, and became 
optimists; and there some who were discouraged 
and took it for granted that nothing was genuine, 
and became pessimists; and there was once in a 
while one who was so accustomed to the counter- 



An Evening Out 325 

feit that he no longer knew how to use the genu- 
ine; and there were not a few who were either 
so conscientious or so timid that they could do 
no business at all, and so went bankrupt and lost 
their place on 'Change. 

By these last the Professor took warning. It 
was a dreadful thing to fail! So he always 
carried a good supply of counterfeit coin in his 
pocket to use in case of emergency. He spent 
it rather gingerly, however, for fear someone 
might lose by it. Besides, he didn't like to en- 
courage the circulation, being a sound money man 
by politics. If he did pass small pieces of the 
bogus sort, it was only to pay in kind, or because 
it was a pleasant game when you had a proper 
partner, or because it was amusing to both him- 
self and his friends for him to appear in this role, 
splendide niendax. At times when it made any 
difference to either himself, the person he was 
with, or the truth itself, he clung to his boyhood 
ideals, and let his communication be. Yea, yea; 
Nay, nay — and was regarded on the whole as 



326 With the Professor 

unsafe. For example, he never would have told 
a woman she could reason, or a fellow-professor 
that he ought to offer his essays to the Parnassic. 
That would have been to encourage the proud and 
haughty spirit which everyone knows is followed 
by a fall that lasts much longer than from morn 
to dewy eve. 

No, I repeat it, the Professor was moderate, 
and not the least bit dangerous. The proof is, 
that on the whole he liked society. It made him 
feel better balanced, healthier in spirit, to go out 
and mingle with his fellows even in this im- 
perfect and extravagant way. He didn't want to 
be too censorious. Perhaps it was necessary to 
expend thus largely of time and money and en- 
ergy in order to get together a hundred people, 
or a dozen, for ten minutes' social intercourse. 
If the intercourse could be got in no other way, 
why, then, it was worth even that. 

If it could be got in no other way . . . 
Yes, under those conditions he would submit to 
anything; for almost anything was better than 



An Evening Out 327 

to be as warped, unbalanced, and unsympathetic 
as those who hved to themselves alone. 

But was it impossible to be social under other 
conditions? The Professor thought not. He 
couldn't see the necessity of so many social Trim- 
mings. His mind went back to his younger days, 
and he remembered a far-off corner of countryside 
where lived a family of farmers, in whose front 
yard (that was before they were called lawns) 
you might have seen on almost any evening or 
holiday afternoon more real sociability than is 
commonly afforded by a dozen dinners or recep- 
tions in high life. Neighbors and acquaintances 
were in the way of dropping in at any time as 
they were passing: 

In Saturn's reign 
Such mixture was not held a stain. 

If it happened to be mealtime, they were made 
welcome at the board, and apologies were neither 
offered nor expected. Genuine and unaffected 
courtesy and kindness reigned, and the stranger 
felt no embarrassment. 



328 With the Professor 

He remembered another place — a log cabin in 
the woods — where he had seen the same life. It 
will probably sound vulgar to you who are more 
familiar with cocktails and cigarettes, but I must 
tell you that into this cabin no one came without 
being offered a clay pipe and a cup o' tay (if you 
wanted whiskey, you asked for it, like a gentle- 
man, and didn't mix it with your other beverage), 
and the '' lawn " was dusty with marks left by 
constant games of *^ quates." 

He had happy recollections of his old home 
in the country, too — of the " big room," included 
in the plans of the farmhouse because his father 
wanted to have the neighbors in once in a while 
for a dance; of a table at which the strange face 
was no rare phenomenon; of a croquet ground 
where half the social life of the community was 
lived. 

Certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, 
The cottage left the palace far behind. 

But that was long of yore, and in the far away. 
Perhaps the same sort of life still obtained, back 



An Evening Out 329 

there in the country. He fervently hoped so, and 
sometimes he beheved so, in spite of a disturb- 
ing consciousness of the invasions of telephone 
service, rural free delivery, electric lines, the mail 
order business, *' maid " servants and trained 
nurses, scientific eight-hour farming, and all the 
other Trimmings of civilization. At least, if real 
sociability had departed from the earth, she had 
left her last footprints in the country, he felt 
assured — like Justice: 

Extrema per illos 
lustitia excedens terris vestigia fecit. 

As for sociability in cities, and especially among 
those who were wont to style themselves the 
upper class, a man who liked the real thing, but 
who could not or would not afford the Trimmings, 
was likely to famish. You might indeed drop 
into an acquaintance's house, but you felt nervous 
about it unless it was the "at home" day; and 
anyway, it was discouraging, this always having 
to put Cerberus to the trouble of coming to an- 
swer the bell and to carry your name to the far- 



330 With the Professor 

off recesses of Elysium before you were admitted, 
to say nothing of the chances of violating the 
last number of the Social Home Journal, 

And as for dropping in to a friendly meal ... 
the Professor paled at the thought of it. No, you 
didn*t drop. You waited until you got several 
weeks' notice in a written, perhaps engraved, 
RSVP'd invitation which you answered with the 
aid of the Book and the people in the lower flat, 
and then you put on your most uncomfortable 
clothes and went to a sort of parade-review, where 
you were paired off with some person whom 
your hostess' logic had unaccountably fixed upon 
as congenial to you, ate a dozen courses which 
satisfied the principle of unity in art by harmoniz- 
ing into one indigestible whole, and then, after the 
end of this dietetic vaudeville, were again united 
in the bonds of unsociability to talk to someone 
who was sure not to like you, and whose dislike 
you were compelled to magnify through your very 
consciousness of a desperate situation. And then, 
in return for the favor, you must pay a dinner 



An Evening Out 331 

call which was robbed of most of its value by 
the consciousness of all that it was a dinner call, 
and which never concerned yon, anyway, because 
you paid it through your wife. And finally, in 
further payment, you must give a dinner your- 
self; and if you did, it must be as good as the 
one you were paying for, and it must be different 
from it, or you might much better not have given 
it. Above all, it must be novel. People expected 
it. The dinner was the thing. Sociability was 
merely a Trimming. It wasn^t the Catonian con- 
vivium, a living together, but the polite Greek 
ffvv6€t7tvov, a feasting together. 

No, there were so many Trimmings to modern 
social life that it was hard to determine where 
the substance was, or whether there was any 
substance. It reminded the Professor of his old 
friend, the Quangle Wangle: 

In the top of the Crumpetty Tree 

The Quangle Wangle sat; 
But his Face you could not see, 

On account of his Beaver Hat. 



332 With the Professor 

For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide, 
With Ribbons and Bibbons on every side, 
With Bells and Buttons and Loops and Lace, 
So that nobody ever could see the Face 
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee! 

Really, if you wanted to enter what was called 
society, you had to be a specialist in Trimmings. 
To get your diploma meant long study and serv- 
ice; and to keep the position it gave you, you 
had to spend all your time henceforth and for- 
evermore in keeping abreast of the general move- 
ment of Trimmings. Where was one to get time 
for anything else? 

And besides, a worse trouble was that if you 
once committed yourself to the policy of Trim- 
mings, you found yourself enmeshed in them on 
every side. Social life was not the only phase 
of human existence which was so beribboned 
and beflounced that you couldn't be sure whether 
there was anything there without first having 
probed with the sharp sword of the spirit — which 
not everyone possessed in his armory. 

There was religion, with its Trimmings. What 



An Evening Out 333 

did the Lord thy God require of thee, but to 
fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways 
and to love Him, and to serve Him with all 
thy heart and all thy soul? And yet there had 
been long periods when, so far as the records 
of history could show. Trimmings had utterly 
obscured the shining face of religion, and dark- 
ness had covered the earth, and gross darkness 
the people. 

And there was government — what masses of 
Trimmings, from town board to committees in 
congress! And there was war, and diplomacy, 
and philanthropy, and even recreation! The 
world was filled with the indirect and inessential. 
And there was 

Something in the word recreation, as its echo 
sounded in the Professor's imagination, made him 
think of education. He hadn't had it cross his 
mind since he came up on to the Garden. His 
train of meditation was suddenly broken off, and 
he lost his complacency. Here he had been 
throwing stones for an hour, forgetting abso- 



334 With the Professor 

lutely that his own house was constructed of 
something less than reinforced concrete. The 
wonder was that he hadn't wrecked it completely. 
He dropped his rocks, much relieved to think 
he had done no damage. They were only pebbles, 
after all — smooth stones out of the brook — and 
he had thrown neither with any great violence 
nor with the precision of a David. 



CHAPTER XII 
MIDNIGHT ON THE ROOF-GARDEN 

lamque tenehat Nox — Night had for some 
time held the mid spaces of the sky, and the 
Professor was still on the Roof-Garden. He had 
sat for some time pondering on the Trimmings 
of Society, and was now gravitating into a medi- 
tation on the Trimmings of Life. For the Trim- 
mings of polite society, though they might be 
more conspicuous and more inane, were never- 
theless but one province of the great world of 
Trimmings Universal. Men were everywhere 
and at all times in greater or less degree a prey 
to either the deception or the tyranny of that 
which was only incidental or accidental to the 
main business of life. 

There was education, for example. The Pro- 
fessor thought of the administration of his col- 
335 



336 With the Professor 

lege — of all the regents, registrars, clerks, secre- 
taries, committees, and advisers, of all the print- 
ing and writing and classifying and pigeon-holing, 
of all the roll-calling and quizzing and examina- 
tion. What was all the marvelous system for? 
Why, in order that young men and women who 
came to college to get an education might be 
prevented from avoiding the thing they came 
for. 

And as for instruction itself (this was a college 
of Liberal Arts) — what expense for illustrative 
and experimental apparatus, for professors and 
assistants, and for scores of thousands of books, 
nine-tenths of which were repetition or obscura- 
tion of the remaining tenth! The shelves of a 
monstrous library would soon be insufficient to 
contain them. Many of them would never be 
read, and most of those that would be read were 
far from indispensable. The Professor couldn't 
help feeling some sympathy with the western 
legislature which refused its university faculty 
an appropriation for books on the ground that 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 337 

they hadn't yet read through what they had in 
their hbrary. 

And all this was to teach young people a few 
ordinary facts, to develop in them the faculty 
of thought, and to communicate an attitude to- 
ward life — something which could be gotten, he 
had often heard, within four bare walls, if you 
had five feet of books, a few rough benches, and 
one or two good teachers. There was such a 
thing as having so many aids to liberal culture 
that you never got to the real business of liberal 
culture, which was to think. Plato and Aristotle 
and the great men of their time — and of all 
time — had been fortunate in the absence of Trim- 
mings. Yes, the Professor had even been told 
that all you needed to do to get a liberal educa- 
tion was to sit at one end of a log, provided at 
the other end you had a MAN. 

And there was business, too. Once upon a 
time in the Professor's institution an auditing sys- 
tem had been installed. He couldn't remember 
clearly, but he thought it was at the persuasion 



338 With the Professor 

of certain professors who were convinced that the 
Scientific Method as employed by them might 
profitably be carried even into the realm of busi- 
ness administration. The scheme involved the 
creation of a number of highly paid clerks, neces- 
sitated endless printing, and cost thousands and 
thousands of dollars a year, and when it was put 
into operation nobody could fill the blanks prop- 
erly without the aid of the professor who invented 
the scheme, and the educational interests of the 
institution began to suffer so much from the nerv- 
ousness of the faculty at large (especially the 
mathematicians, who found little time for any- 
thing but the study and signing of blanks), that 
the system was abandoned— particularly as there 
was general apprehension that its inventor might 
die or resign, and leave his fellow-professors de- 
fenseless. The original reason for its installa- 
tion had been that the professor of philosophy 
had been unable to account for a shortage of 
two dollars and forty cents. 

And there was government — from the house- 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 339 

hold to the nation. What dupHcation, tripHca- 
tion, and multipHcation of men and measures and 
things, what quantities of red tape, and what cir- 
cumlocution offices! And war — what a magnifi- 
cent Trimming it was, and what magnificent 
Trimmings it had : uniforms, battleships, parades, 
promotions, big guns, manifestoes. And all this 
to settle questions of right and wrong after 
the manner of wild beasts : questions, too, raised 
only by men's ignorance of the real, or their 
unwillingness to see it. Why not campaign 
as in antiquity — ^fight in fair seasons only, 
and when you did fight get at it directly, in 
an intimate and familiar way, like Athenian and 
Spartan ? 

Modern warfare a contest of wit, not of brute 
strength? Very well, then, let the Horatii and 
the Curiatii get together and have an adding 
match, or let them spell down, or try the paradigm 
of the Greek verb. Rather, let whole nations do 
it! There would be slaughter for you, and the 
greatest impulse of all toward the beating of 



340 With the Professor 

swords into plowshares, and the inauguration of 
an era of good spelling. 

In philanthropy, too — it cost almost as much to 
organize charities as to relieve the object of char- 
ities. It cost almost as much to send a dollar 
into foreign missions as the dollar was worth. 
Balls for the benefit of the poor cost thousands 
of dollars, and netted tens. 

Nothing escaped Trimmings — not even the 
most sacred things. Even religion had its Trim- 
mings. Pure religion and undefiled before God 
and the Father, the Professor had often been 
told, was this : To visit the fatherless and widows 
in their affliction, and to keep yourself unspotted 
from the world. The chief end of man was to 
glorify God and serve Him forever. It was 
true, of course, that men's ideas might differ as 
to methods, but it was also true, if the Professor 
understood the past and the present, that the 
Trimmings of religion were especially numerous 
and mischievous. He thought of the expense of 
maintaining church worship — paid choirs and 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 341 

organists, paid florists, salaried janitors, printing, 
hymn-books, pastors and assistant pastors. He 
thought of the dozens of organizations in the mod- 
ern church — brotherhoods, sisterhoods, mother- 
hoods, clubs, societies, and leagues of every de- 
scription — social, financial, educational, mission- 
ary, industrial, athletic, musical, political, dra- 
matic. He thought of theological speculation, of 
wars and rumors of war, of all the ills religion 
had been guiltlessly guilty of by reason of Trim- 
mings — 

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum! 

And yet men had always maintained that the 
conversion of souls was the end toward which 
religious effort was to be directed. If there was 
any single detail on which there was unanimous 
consent as to the method of glorifying God, this 
was it: men were to go out into the highways 
and byways, to go into all the world, and preach 
the gospel to every creature. And this was the 
last and least directly striven for of all. Whether 



342 With the Professor 

men did not really, after all, believe in this, or 
whether they were exhausted before they came 
to it, it was notorious that they stopped short 
of its accomplishment. The average man would 
spend his time, his money, and his strength in 
maintaining church services and promoting be- 
nevolences, but it was all but impossible for him 
to bring himself to do personal work among his 
neighbors, or in his own family. It was as if the 
chief end of man were indeed to glorify God, 
but that he could not or would not get farther 
than the glorification of Trimmings. 

Yes, Trimmings were universal. Wherever he 
looked, the Professor saw abundance of the in- 
essential. Many a time when he had tried to 
divide the truth, his sword, arm, and all had 
buried themselves in an unresisting mass of rib- 
bons and fluff, and had been withdrawn without 
a drop of blood to tell of life. 

Why was there so much in the world that 
was indirect, inessential, and merely time-con- 
suming and fruitless ? Why were religion, chari- 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 343 

ties, social communion, education, and even recre- 
ation, so beset behind and before by Trimmings 
that men could live a long life and yet die with- 
out intimate acquaintance with the real? The 
Professor was philosopher enough to know that 
whatever was, however useless or vile, had some 
reason for existence. He was impelled to look 
into the Philosophy of Trimmings. 

With the instinct of the Scientific Mind, he 
reached for pencil and paper, and put down ten 
or twelve numerical heads at the left margin 
of the page. There was nothing like mathemat- 
ical demonstration. For a great many college 
professors, you know, the lines of Spenser: 

But wise words, taught in numbers for to run. 
Recorded by the Muses, live for aye — 

mean something of this sort. 

Opposite number one he set down Ignorance 
as a full-flowing source of Trimmings. Whether 
from accident of natal environment, or from sub- 
sequent decree of fortune, or from general in- 



344 With the Professor 

capacity and dulness, a great many men dwelt 
so continually in the realm of Trimmings that 
they were ignorant of the attractiveness of the 
kingdom of the genuine, or were not even aware 
of its existence. The Professor recalled an old 
story: Hieron had it thrown up to him, by a 
certain one of his enemies, that his breath was 
foul. Going home, therefore, to his wife: 
" What do you say ? " he cried. *' You never told 
me of this ! " But she, being a properly discreet 
and guileless girl : ^* I thought," she said, *' that 
this was the way all the men smelled ! " 

So there were many who knew nothing of 
the charm of simplicity and truth, and who made 
life into coarse and gaudy kaleidoscopic change. 
Among them were the rich and the powerful who 
had always had their desires, and who had always 
been fawned on and flattered, and separated from 
the wholesome truth; and among them, too, were 
the newly-rich, and the silly poor who envied 
and imitated them, people who judged plays by 
the scenery, novels by the description, and men 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 345 

by their clothes, and all others whose vision 
was so blunt or whose natures were so careless 
that their eyes never penetrated beyond the 
exterior. 

For short, the Professor called this class Fools 
— not meaning to reproach them, you understand. 
He knew that fools were born, not made. A 
wiser man than he had said that though you 
should bray a fool in a mortar among wheat 
with a pestle, yet would not his foolishness depart 
from him. 

Opposite the second head the Professor placed 
Vanity. Many men, and women, were filled with 
inordinate love of praise — not so bad when they 
themselves were genuine, and when what they 
strove for was legitimate fame, the fame 

That the clear spirit doth raise 
(That last infirmity of noble mind) 
To scorn delights and live laborious days; 

but productive of endless cheap Trimmings when 
they were of common clay, and were resolved 



346 With the Professor 

on distinction whether for worthy causes, or 
unworthy. For, the emptier of merit your seeker 
after distinction, the greater the number and 
brilHance of the Trimmings he must employ to 
attract attention. Here were to be catalogued men 
and women in the whirl of society, ministers and 
professors who diverted their congregations and 
classes with refined vaudeville, '' original " poets 
and short-story writers, and the rest of the long 
line of life's players who for the most part were 
capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows 
and noise. 

Thirdly in the Professor's list came people of 
Disordered Taste, who could be amused only by 
constant novelty. He did not stop long here — 
just long enough to make a note of neurotic so- 
ciety queens — and kings — jaded epicures, and the 
blase and burnt-out in general. God made them, 
and therefore let them pass for men. 

For the fourth head he wrote down the Un- 
willing — those who had unpleasant or impossible 
duties to perform, and who avoided the labor of 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 347 

execution or the shame of confession by pro- 
longing their attention to the Trimmings. He 
recalled once being sent into the garden, in his 
now far-away childhood, to get a currant switch 
' — for purposes which his mother knew perfectly, 
and regarding which he himself had what he 
later learned to call a good working hypothesis. 
A half hour afterward, she came out and found 
him patiently pulling weeds along the whole row 
of bushes. He would come soon, when he had 
finished. 

He called to mind an incident of his later youth, 
too, when he had taken a young lady to a picnic 
ten miles away, driven a circuit of fifteen to get 
home, gone a mile or two beyond the gate and 
back, played a game of croquet, sat an hour in 
the parlor, invited her to another picnic, and 
gone away without having asked her the question 
as a preliminary to which he had planned the 
whole day. This was not unlike the college re- 
ligious association of his own experience which 
conducted an extensive and expensive epistolary 



348 With the Professor 

campaign, met five hundred students at the sta- 
tion at the beginning of the college year, helped 
them find rooms, saw them through the line on 
registration day, gathered and compiled their re- 
ligious statistics, delivered repeated invitations 
to its meetings, entertained them at socials and 
sacred concerts, all for the purpose of paving the 
way for personal work with them — and by this 
time noticed with relief that it was time to pre- 
pare for the June examinations. 

The fifth class was not so innocent. There 
were many who employed Trimmings deliberately, 
to Deceive. There were monarchs, for example, 
who wanted money for the wars, and blinded 
their peoples with splendid words and ways. 
There were framers of tariff legislation, pseudo- 
artists, orators, and musicians, professors who 
didn't wantto resign, magicians, and clairvoyants. 
It was to the interest of all of these for the 
audience to see, not the real thing, but the 
Trimmings. 

Against number six the Professor placed a less 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 349 

reprehensible cause of Trimmings. This was 
man's natural Impatience of Inactivity. He 
thought of certain of his students who always 
groaned unutterably when they hesitated for a 
word in translation. He called to mind, too, a 
classmate in philosophy who, at the moment he 
was called on, promptly began to recite, and talked 
on until he came to something. Mankind, espe- 
cially in his own country, liked to see ^' something 
doing." There was something reposeful in ac- 
tivity, even if you were not sure it was going 
to accomplish your end. The Professor had been 
in many committee meetings, sacred and profane, 
when a plan of action was adopted and everybody 
was set to work without anyone's knowing very 
well what it was all about. By the time he had 
found out, he was in the case of the Knicker- 
bocker historian, and had to pause and take breath, 
and recover from the excessive fatigue he had 
undergone in preparing to begin his undertaking 
— " in this but imitating the example of a re- 
nowned Dutch tumbler of antiquity, w^ho took a 



350 With the Professor 

start of three miles for the purpose of jumping 
over a hill, but having run himself out of breath 
by the time he reached the foot, sat himself quietly 
down for a few moments to blow, and then 
walked over at his leisure." 

Only — ^most people had neither the courage nor 
the sense of the Dutchman, but turned back, or 
kept on sitting, or took a run for another hill, 
with the same result. The world was full of 
people who were either running toward hills, or 
blowing from effort: by the look of them you 
would think them mighty leapers. But when hills 
were climbed, it was usually by sober people who 
made no great fuss either before or during the 
ascent. 

When the Professor came to the seventh head 
he pondered for some time. He knew there were 
more causes for Trimmings than a mere half 
dozen, and yet at the moment he could think of 
nothing more to set down. He leaned back 
and thought. . . . Perhaps if he let his 
mind wander a while in the general realm 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 351 

of Trimmings, he would receive a sugges- 
tion. 

He hadn't gone farther than the Trimmings 
on his wife's last hat (hats were good that year) 
when the suggestion came. It was Art; and the 
Trimmings that resulted from it were legitimate 
and desirable. The reason why he had not 
thought of it before was of course that he had 
not been looking for virtue in Trimmings. But 
you must not get the idea that the Professor 
was set against all Trimmings — one of the kind 
who think clothes are only for covering and 
warmth, church spires only for the support of 
lightning rods, and language and pictures only 
for the convenience of advertisers. Not at 
all. 

Quite the contrary, one of the few principles 
of art which he thought he understood was that 
architecture — and all the other arts — stood in 
need of certain devices to emphasize dimensions 
and outlines, to aid the eye and the soul to com- 
prehend the essential meaning of what was before 



352 With the Professor 

them. The human body in painting and sculpture 
needed skilfully arranged drapery, and so it did in 
life — to set off its exquisite lines. A temple 
needed color and ornament to give it clarity of 
outline; a vase was the better for decoration to 
give its graceful proportions more distinctness. 

In the same way, religious devotion stood in 
need of music and speech and form, the poem 
must have rhyme or rhythm, and the general busi- 
ness of life had to be clarified and expedited by 
the Trimmings of organization and the amenities. 
Without this kind of Trimmings life could not 
be lived abundantly, and civilization would de- 
generate into barbarism. 

But the Professor's principle of art went on 
farther, to specify that ornament existed not for 
its own sake, but for the sake of what it orna- 
mented. Here was the trouble with that great 
work of art, human Hfe: it had not in all cases 
been left to artists to furnish the Trimmings. 
Pseudo-artists, well-meaning bunglers, and even 
artizans, had all too frequently been commissioned 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 353 

on great works. Ignorance and Conceit and 
Commerce had filled the world with base imita- 
tions which contained but a negligible part of 
the excellence of the real, and were possible 
only because the undiscriminating multitude lived 
by Trimmings alone. Just as there were pseudo- 
Plautuses and pseudo-Peruginos ; so were there 
pseudo-culture, pseudo-religion, pseudo-education, 
pseudo-sociability, and pseudo-amusement. 

And that human kind was wasting itself over 
Trimmings was not the worst thing about it. 
That was bad; but worse was the fact that 
Trimmings were responsible for the great 
breaches between men and men. The hierarchy 
of human society was in the last analysis due 
to the inessential. All men were by nature de- 
sirous of distinction — among them the undeserv- 
ing no less than those who possessed merit. To 
such, since Reality could bring no distinc- 
tion, the way to it lay open only through paths 
that were available. They could not excel; there- 
fore they would differ. Trimmings, loud and ex- 



354 With the Professor 

pensive imitations of the Real, would insure them 
their desire. These could be purchased. Enter 
money. Enter strife and struggle, selfishness, in- 
justice, violence, oppression, crime, splendor, mis- 
ery. The history of civilization was filled with 
it. The history of mankind, the Professor had 
read, was the history of the struggle for liberty. 
Liberty from what, if not from the oppression 
of those who were in blind and passionate pur- 
suit of Trimmings? 

The Professor left eight, nine, and ten blank, 
for future convenience : he might think of some- 
thing further before sleep overtook him — or he 
overtook sleep. He would take the sheet and 
pencil to his room, so that he could get up and 
use them in case he had an idea — like the great 
men he had read about. 

Meanwhile, he jotted down a remedy. Of 
course you expect one; and, being a Professor, of 
course he had one to propose. 

It didn't require much space. It was just the 
single word: Philosophy. 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 355 

When I tell you that it was philosophy, of 
course your first thought is that the Professor 
was a doctrinaire. But he wasn't, except in the 
innocent matter of thinking that the subject he 
taught was indispensable to any rational educa- 
tion. But this is common to all professors. For 
your real doctrinaire you must go to modern sub- 
jects, not to professors of Greek and Latin litera- 
ture, who have met so much twentieth century 
civilization in ancient Athens and Rome as to 
recognize that what is called progress is after 
all more or less a matter of Trimmings; that 

Science proceeds, and Man stands still. 
Our world to-day's as good, or ill, 

As cultured, nearly, 
As yours was, Horace 

and who look twice before organizing an interna- 
tional faculty baseball game on the strength of 
possessing an untested soap-bubble. 

The Professor was under no delusions. He 
knew that philosophy was no Cure-all. If it had 
been. Trimmings would have gone out of style 



356 With the Professor 

long before Socrates. Not that it had no potency. 
The Professor could testify to its efficacy. The 
trouble was, you couldn't get people to take it. 
Some made faces at the first dose, and declared 
that the remedy was worse than the disease. 
Others would not look at it : they had taken medi- 
cine before, and it was bitter. Still others had 
already tried it, and it had done them no good. 
The fact was, there were so many worthless 
imitations that many never got the genuine, soon 
became discouraged, and lost faith. For Trim- 
mings are wont to obscure philosophy as well 
as other goods of life. 

But Real Philosophy the Professor knew was 
a good thing for rich and poor alike, and neglect 
of it was harmful to both young and old. And 
an older and wiser than either he or Horace had 
said that wisdom was the principal thing, and 
called happy the man who found it. Length of 
days was in her right hand : and in her left hand 
riches and honor. 

You see that the Professor's Philosophy was 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 2>i7 

the kind without Trimmings, or at least that it 
was very h'ghtly trimmed, and by his own hand. 
I ought to have told you in the first place that it 
was neither Stoic, nor Epicurean, nor anything 
else with a name. 

But if it was without fixed form, and variable 
according to the taste of the individual artist, 
it was nevertheless not void. It had one immuta- 
ble tenet: its essence was the just perception of 
values — to know a good thing or a good man 
when you saw one; to realize in thought and 
action that the eternal verities were few, but 
real; that the simple and the Untrimmed goods 
of life were in the main the nearest at hand and 
the most abundant, and also the most valuable; 
and that Trimmings for Trimmings' sake did 
not pay. 

And it was not a philosophy of the head only. 
It was also a philosophy of the heart. If it were 
not so easy to be misunderstood, perhaps it would 
be as well to call it Religion; for if you strip 
religion of its Trimmings, you find at its heart 



358 With the Professor 

a philosophy of Hfe, or you find nothing at all. 
And it was like religion, too, in this: that it 
didn't depend upon learning, though learning (of 
the Untrimmed sort) made it more intelligent 
and effective. 

And if the Professor was no doctrinaire, and 
no conventionalist, neither was he that other un- 
pleasant but indispensable character, the Uncom- 
promising Idealist. He would not rail at Trim- 
mings, like a Juvenal; he would laugh at them, 
like a Flaccus. After all, the world was bound 
to have Trimmings, and part of the world liked 
Trimmings better than anything else. Definitions 
might vary. It was the fitting thing for each 
to measure himself by his own yard-stick. 

But for his single self, he had as lief not be 
as live to be in awe of such a thing as Trimmings. 
He would not be enslaved. Every philosopher 
was a king, and every fool a slave. He would 
be answerable to his own conscience. He would 
submit to Trimmings when they were necessary, 
enjoy th^m when they were innocent, encourage 



Midnight on the Roof-Garden 359 

them when they were real art, laugh at them 
when they were silly, and despise them only when 
they were vile. He would follow the sage's ad- 
vice — to be, not seem. He would teach his stu- 
dents first of all the messages of the great souls 
of literature; he would let his charity begin at 
home, in just and generous dealing with those 
whose lot was less fortunate than his own; he 
would let his religion be the giving of the cup 
of cold water in His Name, and to owe no man 
aught but to love one another; he would meet 
his friends on the basis of congeniality of spirit, 
without regard to their rank or the amount of 
their possessions; his diversions, too, he would 
seek in the realm of the unconventional. He 
would cling to the eternal verities, according to 
the teaching of his friends of the Roof-Garden, 
and with as little indirection as possible in the 
midst of a society whose members were so intent 
on the Trimmings of life as to lose the reasons 
for living: 

Et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. 



360 With the Professor 

So concluding, the Professor descended from 
the Roof -Garden, and slept the sleep of the man 
who has formulated a restful theory of conduct. 



THE END 



"THE RETURN OF THE ESSAY" 

FABIAN FRANKLIN'S PEOPLE AND PROBLEMS 

By the Editor of The Baltimore News and Sometime Pro- 
fessor in Johns Hopkins University. $1.50 net. 

Dr. Franklin marks his retirement from the editorship of The 
Baltimore News, which he has held since 1895, by a collection of 
his ripest work. This includes comprehensive discussion of 
*• Newspapers and Exact Thinking," " James Joseph Sylvester," 
" The Intellectual Powers of Woman," and " A Defect of Public 
Discussion in America," with some three-score editorials. 

" Mr. Franklin discussed political, economic, financial and social problems 
with knowledge and illuminating clarity ; the stage and literature both 
occupied part of his journalistic attention ; he discussed foreign affairs, 
especially those of the French nation, intelligently, and he wrote well- 
informed estimates of such diverse personalities as Grover Cleveland, Glad- 
stone, Thomas F. Bayard, Cecil Rhodes, M. S. Quay, Dr. Osier, Ibsen and 
Colonel Picquart, the defender of Dreyfus and now Minister of War."— Pl^i^a- 
delphia Press. 

"All upon subjects that were of more than passing consequence. Still 
good reading, and will not soon lose a certain permanent value of informed, 
level-headed, temperate and scholarly comment upon matters of moment 
in the National life."— iV. 7. Times Eeview. 

MISS E. B. SHERMAN'S 
WORDS TO THE WISE— AND OTHERS 

In this new volume Miss Sherman discusses The Koot and 
Foliage of Style— When Steel Strikes Punk— Our Kin and Others 
—Where the Veil is Thin — At the End of the Rainbow — Ruskin — 
Serendipity — Modern Letter Writing, with various actual 
examples — Our Comedie Humaine — The Slain that Are Not 
Numbered — A Plea for the Naturalization of Ghosts. $1.50 net. 

" Piquant reading . . . we can recommend the book."— iVaiiow. 

" Distinguished by a family appeal, underlying tenderness and sparkle. 
To wide reading and sympathetic knowledge of human nature the author 
joins high ideals and a keen sense of humor . . . clever, graceful and sug- 
gestive writing. . . . Considered in connection with countless other excel- 
lent works of the crowded literary season it resembles * an oasis green in 
deserts dry.' ''—Chicago Record-Herald. 

"Brilliant essays, some of them deserving of a place among the best in 
English literature."- ^Sare Francisco Chronicle. 

" Such graces of mind, and heart, and pen as have made the charm and 
fame of a Montaigne, a Lamb, a Samuel Crothers, an Agnes Repplier."— 
Louisville Courier- Journal. 

MISS E. B. SHERMAN'S TAPER LIGHTS 

12mo, $1.25. 

*' A marvelously brilliant collection of subtle and fascinating essays."— 
Boston Transcript. 

"The first satisfactory stopping place is the last v^^q"— Springfield 
Republican. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY ^^|^'?5g| 



^^THE RETURN OF THE ESSAY" 

MISS ZEPHINE HUMPHREY'S OVER AGAINST 
GREEN PEAK 

A humorous, homely and poetic account of New England 
country life. $1.25 net. 

" Describes with sympathetic spirit the tasks and the pleasures of life 
there, and emphasizes the high aims to which one may reach even though 
the city be far away."— -Bo«to/i Transcript. 

" The book has a fine wholesome atmosphere and its last chapter is pure 
poetry."— ifi«s Mien Bums Sherman, author of "Words to the Wise— and 

Others." 

" Verily it is a delicious piece of work and that last chapter is a genuine 
poem. Best of all is the charming sincerity of the hook."— George Gary 

Eggleston. 

" Not exactly fiction, yet with some of the best qualities of fiction in that 
it has characters who are individualized and humor that is gentle and 
cheery . . . the unmistakable air of literary grace and refinement." — 2'he 
Outlook. 

" Delightful appreciation of the poetic side of life and the fun which is 
the heritage of the courageous and patient."— T^e Congi-egationaZist. 

" Thoroughly agreeable little book . . . one can figure it as keeping its 
place for many a year among beloved volumes, to be presented half a century 
hence to the attention of youth, with : ' Ah, they don't write such books as 
that, nowadays.' "—The Living Age. 

J. A. SPENDER'S COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT 

By the editor of the Westminster Gazette. $1.25 net. 

" A whimsical, very interesting and, at the same time, very real, if imag- 
inary, character who, as bachelor, uncle, book lover, elderly civil servant 
and so on, is well worth the acquaintance of everybody, no matter how 
careful in the matter of making friends."— iV. T. Evening Sun. 

'* Thoughtful, pungent, and at times invested with a grave and subtle 
humor, . . . They promote thought . . . possesses peculiar and individual 
qualities which mark it as an unusual production . . . distinctly worth 
while." — Brooklyn Eagle. 

"Its general characteristics one might dare to say are sincerity and 
wisdom. It is genial without being cynical. It is serious without being 
solemn. It is liberal without being violent or impatient ... a witty, 
singularly modest, contained and gracious manner." — Chicago Evening Post. 

" While affording the easiest of reading, nevertheless touches deep issues 
deeply and fine issues finely. The author not only thinks himself, but 
makes you think. Whether Bagshot is dealing with death and immortality, 
or riches and socialism, he always contrives to be pungent and interesting 
and yet urbane, for there is no attempt in the book either at flashy cynicism 
or cheap epigram."— TAe Spectator (London). 



HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



WIILLAM DE MORGAN'S IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN 

The story of the great love of ** Blind Jim" and his little girl, 
and of the affairs of a successful novelist. Fourth printing. 

$1.75. 

"William De Morgan at his very htsi"—Independe7ii. 

"Another long delightful voyage with the best English company. The 
story of a child certainly not less appealing to our generation than Little 
Nell was to hers."— //«sze/ York Times Saturday Review. 

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S SOMEHOW GOOD 

The dramatic story of some modern English people in a 
strange situation. Fourth printing. $1.75. 

"A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range of 
fiction."— The Nation. 

" Our older novelists (Dickens and Thackeray) will have to look to their 
laurels, for the new one is fast proving himself their equal. A higher quality 
of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other novelist now liv- 
ing and active in either England or America."— TZte Dial. 

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S ALICE-FOR-SHORT 

The story of a London waif, a friendly artist, his friends and 
family. Seventh printing. $1.75. 

" Really worth reading and praising . . . will be hailed as a masterpiece. 
If any writer of the present era is read a half century hence, a quarter 
century, or even a decade, that writer is William De MoTgan."— Boston 
Transcript. 

** It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in those rich, interesting, over- 
crowded books. . . . Will be remembered as Dickens's novels are 
remembered."— 5/r2«^/zWci Reptiblican. 

WILLIAM DE MORGAN'S JOSEPH VANCE 

A novel of life near London in the 50's. Tenth printing. 

$1.75. 

" The book of the last decade ; the best thing in fiction since Mr. Meredith 
and Mr. Hardy ; must take its place as the first great English novel that has 
appeared in the twentieth century."— Lewis Melville in New York Times 
Saturday Review. 

"If the reader likes both 'David Copperfield ' and 'Peter Ibbetson,' he 
can find the two books in this one."— 7%« Independent. 

*** A twenty-four page illustrated leaflet about Mr. De Morgan, with 
complete reviews of his books, sent on request. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



Jrl ale's 13ramatists of To-day 

Rostand, Hauptmann, Sudermann, 
Pinero, Shaw, Phillips, Maeterlinck 

By PkOF. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, Jr., of Union 
College. With gilt top, $1.50 net. (By mail, $1.60.) 

An informal discussion of their principal plays and of 
the performances of some of them. A few of those con- 
sidered are Man and Superman, Candida, Cyrano 
de Bergerac, L'Azglon, The Sunken Bell, Mag da, 
Ulysses, Letty, Iris, and Pelleas afid Melisande. The 
volume opens with a paper "On Standards of Criti- 
cism," and concludes with " Our Idea of Tragedy," and 
an appendix of all the plays of each author, with dates 
of their first performance or publication. 



*' He writes in a pleasant, free-and-easy way. . . . He 
accepts things chiefly at their face value, but he describes them so accu- 
rately and agreeably that he recalls vividly to mind the plays we have seen 
and the pleasure we have found in them." 

New York Evening Post : "It is not often nowadays that a theatrical 
book can be met with so free from gush and mere eulogy, or so weighted 
JDy common sense ... an excellent chronological appendix and full 
index . . . uncommonly useful for reference." 

Dial: " Noteworthy example of literary criticism in one of the most in- 
teresting of literary fields. . . . Provides a varied menu of the most 
interesting character. . . . Prof. Hale establishes confidential relations 
with the reader from the start. . . . Very definite opinions, clearly 
reasoned and amply fortified by example. . , . Well worth reading a 
second time." 

New York Tribune .* *' Both instructive and entertaining." 

Brooklyn Eagle: " A dramatic critic who is not just ' busting * himself 
with Titanic intellectualities, but who is a readable dramatic critic. . . , 
Mr. Hale is a modest and sensible, as well as an acute and sound otitic. . . . 
Most people will be surprised and delighted with Mr. Hale'f simplicity, 
perspicuity, and ingenuousness." 

New York Dramatic Mirror: " Though one may not always agree 
with Mr. Hale's opinions, yet one always finds that he has something 
interesting to say, and that he says it well. Entertaining and generally 
instructive without being pedantic." 

The Theatre: "A pleasing lightness of touch. . . . Very readable 
book." 



Henry Holt and Company 

Publishers New York 



CLAYTON HAMILTON'S 

THE THEORY OF THE THEATRE 

And Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism 

By the Author of ' 'Materials and Methods of Fiction' * 
Probable Price, $1.50 net 

CONTENTS : 

The Theory of the Theater. — What is a Play? — The Psychology 
of Theatre Audiences. — The Actor and the Dramatist. — Stage Con- 
ventions in Modern Times. — Economy of Attention in Theatrical Per- 
formances. — Emphasis in the Drama. — The Four Leading Types of 
Drama: Tragedy and Melodrama; Comedy and Farce. — The Modern 
Social Drama. 

Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism. — The Public and the 
Dramatist. — Dramatic Art and the Theatre Business. — The Happy End- 
ings in the Theatre- — The Boundaries of Approbation. — Imitation and 
Suggestion in the Drama. — Holding the INIirror up to Nature. — Blank 
Verse on the Contemporary Stage. — Dramatic Literature and Theatric 
Journalism. — The Intention of Performance. — The Quality of New 
Endeavor. — The Effect of Plays upon the Public. — Pleasant and Un- 
pleasant Plays. — Themes in the Theatre. — The Function of Imagination. 



CONSTANCE D'ARCY MACKAY'S 

THE HOUSE OF THE HEART 

And Other Plays for Children 

Ten well- written one-act pla3^s to be acted by children. A 

satisfactory book to fill a real need. $1.10 net, by mail $1.15. 

" Each play contains a distinct lesson, whether of courage, gentle 
manners, or contentment. The settings are simple and the costumes 
within the compass of the schoolroom. Full directions for costumes, 
scene setting, and dramatic action are given with each play. All of 
them have stood the test of actual production." — Preface. 

CONTENTS: 

"The House of the Heart" (Morality Play) — "The Gooseherd and the 
Goblin" (Comedy, suitable for June exercises)— "The Enchanted Garden" 
(Flower Play, suitable for June exercises)— "Nimble Wit and Fingerkin" 
(Industrial Play)— "A Little Pilgrim's Progress" (Morality Play, suitable 
for Thanksgiving) — "A Pageant of Hours" (To be given Out of Doors) — 
"On Christmas Eve"— "The Elf Child "—" The Princess and the Pixies" 
—"The Christmas Guest" (Miracle Play). 

" An addition to child drama which has been sorely needed." 

— Boston Transcript. 

*** If the reader will send his name and address the publishers will send, 
from time to time, information regarding their new books. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

34 WSST 33D STREET J^EW YORK 



RICHARD BURTON'S 
MASTERS OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL 

A study of principles and personalities by the Professor 

of English Literature, University of Minnesota, author of 

"Literary Likings," "Eorces in Fiction/' "Eahab" (a 

Poetic Drama), etc. 12mo, 331 pp. and index. $1.25 

net. 

Contents: Fiction and the Novel, — Eighteenth Century Begin- 
nings : Richardson, — Eighteenth Century Beginnings : Fielding, — 
Developments : Smollett, Sterne and Others, — Realism : Jane Aus- 
ten, — Modern Romanticism : Scott, — French Influence, Dickens, — 
Thackeray, — George Eliot, — TroUope and Others, — Hardy and 
Meredith, — Stevenson, — The American Contribution, — Index. 

RICHARD BURTON'S 
RAHAB, A DRAMA OF THE FALL OF JERICHO 

119 pp., 12mo. $1.25 net; by mail, $1.33. With cast of 

characters for the first performance and pictures of the 

scenes. 

" A poetic drama of high quality. Plenty of dramatic action." 
— New York Times Review. 

WILUAM MORTON PAYNE'S 

THE GREATER ENGLISH POETS OF THE NINETEENTH 

CENTURY 

383 pp., large 12mo. $2.00 net; by mail, $2.15. Studies 
of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, 
Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and Swin- 
burne. Their outlook upon life rather than their strictly 
literary achievement is kept mainly in view. 

" The sound and mellow fruits of his long career as a critic. . . . 
There is not a rash, trivial, or dull line in the whole book. . . . 
Its charming sanity has seduced me into reading it to the end, and 
anyone who does the same will feel that he has had an inspiring 
taste of everything that is finest in nineteenth-century poetry. 
Ought to be read and reread by every student of literature, and 
most of all by those who have neglected English poetry, for here 
one finds its essence in brief compass." — Chicago Record-Herald. 

If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will 
send, from time to time, information regarding their new books. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



MRS. E. L. VOYNICH'S THE GADFLY 

An intense romance of the Italian rising against the Austrians 
early in the nineteenth century. Twenty-first printing. $1.25. 

" One of the most powerful novels of the decade."— iVetw York Tribune. 

ANTHONY HOPE'S THE PRISONER OF ZENDA 

Being the history of three months in the life of an English 
gentleman. Illustrated by C. D. Gibson. Fifty-first printing. 
$1.50. 

ANTHONY HOPE'S RUPERT OF HENTZAU 

A sequel to "The Prisoner of Zenda." Illustrated by C. D. 
Gibson. Twenty-first printing. $1.50. 

These stirring romances established a new vogue in fiction and 
are among the most widely-read novels. Each has been success- 
fully dramatized. 

C N. AND A. M. WILLIAMSON'S THE UGHTNING 
CONDUCTOR 

New illustrated edition. Twenty-first printing. $1.50. 

A humorous love story of a beautiful American and a gallant 
Englishman who stoops to conquer. Two almost human auto- 
mobiles play prominent parts. There are picturesque scenes in 
Provence, Spain and Italy. 

" Altogether the best automobile story of which we have knowledge, and 
might serve almost as a guide-book for highway travel from Jr'aris to Sicily." 
— Atlantic Monthly. 

C. N. AND A. M. WILUAMSON'S THE PRINCESS 
PASSES 

Illustrated by Edward Penfield. Eighth printing. $1.50. 

" The authors have duplicated their success with 'The Lightning Con- 
ductor.' . . . Unusually absorbing."— Boston TranscHpt. 

D, D. WELLS' HER LADYSHIP'S ELEPHANT 

This humorous Anglo-American tale made an instantaneous 
hit. Eighteenth printing. $1.25. 

** He is probably funny because he cannot help it. . . . Must consent 
to be regarded as a benefactor of his kind without responsibiU*-.y."— TAe 
Nation. 

* If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will send, 
from time to time, information regarding their new books. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS (X-'07) NEW YORK 



BIOLOGY AND ITS MAKERS By W. A. Locy. 

By the Professor of Biology in Northwestern University. 

123 illustrations. 8vo. $2.75 net, by mail $2.88, 

" Entertainingly written, and, better than any other existing single 
work in any language, gives the layman a clear idea of the scope and 
developi^ent of the broad science of biology."— 7"^^ Dial, 

CANADIAN TYPES OF THE OLD REGIME By C. W. Colby. 

By the Professor of History in McGill University. 18 ill"'*-- 

trations. 8vo. $2.75 net, by mail $2.90. 

" A light and graceful style. Not only interesting reading, but gives 
as clear a notion of what the old regime was at its best as may be found 
anywhere in a single volume."— Li^^rary Digest. 



THE BUILDERS OF UNITED ITALY By R. S. Holland. 

With 8 portraits. Large i2mo. $2.00 net, by mail $2.13. 
Historical biographies of Alfieri, Manzoni, Gioberti, Manin, 
Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel. 

" Popular but not flimsy."— 7',*^ Nation. 

THE ITAUANS OF TO-DAY By Ren6 Bazin. 

By the author of "The Nun,'* etc. Translated by Wm. 

Marchant. $1.25 net, by mail $1.35. 

*'A most readable book. He touches upon everything."— i?<;^/tf» 
Transcript. 

DARWINISM TO-DAY By V. L. Kellogg. 

By the author of *• American Insects," etc. Svo. $2.00 net, 

by mail $2.12. 

" Can write in English as brightly and as clearly as the oldtime French- 
men. . . . In his text he explains the controversy so that the plain 
man may understand it, while in the notes he adduces the evidence that 
the specialist requires. ... A brilliant book that deserves general 
attention."— .A^^zt; York Sun. 

,*, If the reader will send his name and address, the publishers will 
send, from time to time, information regarding their new books. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

34 WEST 33d STREET NEW YORK 



<^cV 



.^ ^. ^:^^ 




A' c 



-J ^ .>>' '^. 






.Oo 









.0^ 



^ \^ 



-S-. 



\. ,/>^ 



A-' ' 



^ 









x-;^ 












^ a\ 



^0 



,0' 



O 



'. ^^. .^^ 






^. -^c. 






Oc 



•V .,^^^ 



\\' 



,\ -f' 






% 



:4l 






'/^^ *'>S0^_^^ 



















.^^ 



v^^ 



^. ^'^<i?^ .. ^^ 






^■M * ^0 c 









A- 






■-^. ^\\ 



-^ 



^-,^/yO^i^ 



1 _> 



.Oo 



.,A 



^^V,<^ ., ■=/ 












./^-- '^ '^'^i^^-v 






• SS^ ^ ■ .^^ -i ■ V .■^' 















A ^-^ 


N ^ 


^ 




(^V 




\> 




'•^^. 








"^^ 


.^^^'' 






^^^ 








. N- 












■^ -'/ / 


^ 






■<^ ' -^ 


i, ■• 






, -^f 








"^A 


>^' 






. . x^' 


-. 






^^o■^ 





v^^' ' V 



■0- ,^ 



-^/ c^ 



N -^^^ 



.^^ ■'^>. 



